Perceiving Speech Aggression with and without Textual Context on Twitter Social Network Site

Abstract

The Internet has become the leading place for the emergence and spread of aggressive behavior. All major social network sites today work in one way or another to maintain a respectful atmosphere within their communities. Besides all this work to harmonize communication, today speech aggression is still a common fact within internet-communication on social network sites. The paper explores speech aggression perception in internet-communication of Russian speaking Twitter users. We suppose that taking into account such factors as communicative situation and communicative context, when analyzing the fact of speech aggression implementation, will increase the accuracy of determining the nature (direction) of speech aggression in the process of speech communication on social network sites. Based on ten tweet stimuli selected we perform an empirical research recruiting 45 Russian speaking recipients and asking them to detect speech aggression in tweets without and within textual context. The results of the research argue that indeed, the presence of textual context influences the interpretation of the tweet as an offensive or a defensive aggressive speech act.