Application of linguistic cues in the analysis of language of hate groups

Abstract

Hate speech and fringe ideologies are social phenomena that thrive on-line. Members of the political and religious fringe are able to propagate their ideas via the Internet with less effort than in traditional media. In this article, we attempt to use linguistic cues such as the occurrence of certain parts of speech in order to distinguish the language of fringe groups from strictly informative sources. The aim of this research is to provide a preliminary model for identifying deceptive materials online. Examples of these would include aggressive marketing and hate speech. For the sake of this paper, we aim to focus on the political aspect. Our research has shown that information about sentence length and the occurrence of adjectives and adverbs can provide information for the identification of differences between the language of fringe political groups and mainstream media.