The Sociolinguistic Impact of Sexist Hate Speech in Gender Discriminatory Pictorial Memes on Facebook

Abstract

There is a border-line difference between free speech and hate speech. Any racist, violence based, and discriminatory speech is called hate speech. Now a days, internet has converted the concept of distance and social networking sites (SNS) has made it possible to spread any kind of hate-speech. Pictorial memes are a common way of spreading something on SNS like Facebook. Most of the memes which are spreading based on sexist speech that is gender discriminatory. The analysis was based on three-layered communication process. Five pictorial memes along with the comments were selected from SNS platform. The reason of adding comments in the discussion was necessary because it can show the societal impact of gender discrimination which were spread through the memes. For the current study only the linguistic and social impacts of sexist hate speech are analysed in the study without any regional portfolio. The results of the study shows that most of the time female gender is targeted through sexist hate-speech, because male consider themselves superior, experienced, and intelligent, hence they create sexist remarks on the memes.