Hate Speech on Social Media: A Pragmatic Approach

Abstract

This research is based on people’s behavior in communicating on social media, especially Facebook, which is currently developing without boundaries. In expressing their thoughts, a person often does not maintain ethics and provisions in communicating on social media. For personal gain, individuals or groups of people use language for the purpose of humiliating, insulting, degrading and defaming other individuals or groups of society they dislike. This phenomenon is widely known as hate speech. In line with the Pragmatic Approach, referring to the study of language use with its actual usage aspects, the utterances produced by language users have an effect that could influence the listener to grasp the meaning conveyed and take action as a result of the utterance. This study aims to reveal the types of hate speech on social media based on the criteria developed by Austin, and the meaning of hate speech spoken by individuals to other individuals on Facebook social media, using qualitative descriptive methods. The results show that hate speech on social media can be classified based on illocutionary acts developed by Austin, into verdictive, behabitives, and expositive. Keywords: Pragmatics, social media, illocutionary acts, hate speech