Cover not available

Article published In: Young researchers in action
Edited by Angeliki Tzanne
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 10:1] 2022
► pp. 38–63

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Impoliteness across social media platforms

A comparative study of conflict on YouTube and Reddit

 | National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Published online: 25 May 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.00066.ten
Abstract
This paper responds to the call for more comparative research across online social media platforms (Graham, Sage L., and Claire Hardaker. 2017. “(Im)politeness in Digital Communication.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 785–814. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar, 808) and examines discourse across two such platforms, YouTube and Reddit. More specifically, it attempts to investigate whether the affordances of these platforms have an impact on the amount and form of impoliteness employed by their users.
Data on a highly contested topic (the July 2018 wildfires in Attica, Greece) is studied both qualitatively and quantitatively. First, small but representative samples are qualitatively analyzed on the basis of the two major impoliteness types: implicational and conventionalized and their subcategories. In addition, swearword keywords extracted by means of corpus analysis tools are analyzed. It is shown that YouTube involves a great deal of (conventionalized) impoliteness (Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011a. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) which could be due to factors such as the total absence of moderation, of post length limit and of detailed personal profiles as well as the presence of videos as stimuli for interaction. Considerably less impoliteness appears on Reddit, whose forum-like nature makes it a place that mostly invites civil interaction. Implicationally impolite (Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011a. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) posts outnumber conventionally impolite ones, perhaps owing to the heavy moderation, the existence of public profiles and the size and coherence of the user community. It is concluded that, due to their characteristics, platforms seem to attract a certain userbase with its own motives and mindset, which in turn shape the impoliteness found within them.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Online discourse
    • 2.1YouTube
    • 2.2Reddit
    • 2.3Impoliteness in online platforms
  • 3.Theoretical framework
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Data
    • 4.2Procedure of analysis
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1YouTube
    • 5.2Reddit
    • 5.3Corpus analysis of YouTube and Reddit
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (52)
References
Agarwal, Nitin, Huan Liu, Sudheendra Murthy, Arunabha Sen, and Xufei Wang. 2009. “A Social Identity Approach to Identify Familiar Strangers in a Social Network.” In Proceedings of the Third International ICWSM Conference. San Jose, California, United States: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI): 2–9.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Allen, Kelsey, Giuseppe Carenini, and Raymond T. Ng. 2014. “Detecting Disagreement in Conversations Using Pseudo-monologic Rhetorical Structure.” In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing – EMNLP 2014. Doha, Qatar: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL): 1169–1180. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Angouri, Jo, and Theodora Tseliga. 2010. “‘you HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT!’: From E-disagreement to E-impoliteness in Two Online Fora.” Journal of Politeness Research 6(1):57–82. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid KhosraviNik, Michal Krzyzanowski, Tony McEnery, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. “A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press.” Discourse & Society 19(3):273–306. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Benson, Phil. 2016. The Discourse of YouTube: Multimodal Text in a Global Context. New York: Taylor and Francis. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bergstrom, Kelly. 2011. “‘Don’t Feed the Troll’: Shutting down Debate about Community Expectations on Reddit.com.” First Monday 16(8):1–9. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bou-Franch, Patricia, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich. 2014. “Conflict Management in Massive Polylogues: A Case Study from YouTube.” Journal of Pragmatics 731:19–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bou-Franch, Patricia, Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, and Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich. 2012. “Social Interaction in YouTube Text-based Polylogues: A Study of Coherence.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 17(4):501–521. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bousfield, Derek. 2008. Impoliteness in Interaction. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boyd, Michael S. 2014. “(New) Participatory Framework on YouTube? Commenter Interaction in US Political Speeches.” Journal of Pragmatics 721:46–58. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope, and Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Originally published as Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. In Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, edited by Esther Goody, 56-289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Chandrasekharan, Eshwar, Mattia Samory, Anirudh Srinivasan, and Eric Gilbert. 2017. “The Bag of Communities: Identifying Abusive Behavior Online with Preexisting Internet Data.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – CHI ’17. Denver, United States: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): 3175–3187. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2011a. Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011b. “Politeness and Impoliteness.” In Pragmatics of Society, edited by Karin Aijmer and Gisle Andersen, 393–438. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Derks, Daantje, Agneta H. Fischer, and Arjan E. R. Bos. 2008. “The Role of Emotion in Computer-mediated Communication: A Review.” Computers in Human Behavior 24(3):766–785. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dynel, Marta. 2012. “Swearing Methodologically: The (Im)politeness of Expletives in Anonymous Commentaries on YouTube.” Journal of English Studies 10(1):25–50. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. “Isn’t it Ironic? Defining the Scope of Humorous Irony.” Humor 27(4):619–639. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2015. “The Landscape of Impoliteness Research.” Journal of Politeness Research 11(2):329–354. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2018. “Theoretically on Mock Politeness in English and Italian.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 6(1):149–165. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ermida, Isabel. 2013. “‘A Beached Whale Posing in Lingerie’: Conflict Talk, Disagreement and Impoliteness in Online Newspaper Commentary.” Revista Diacritica 27(1):95–130.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Frobenius, Maximiliane, and Cornelia Gerhardt. 2017. “Discourse and Organization.” In Pragmatics of Social Media, edited by Christian R. Hoffmann and Wolfram Bublitz, 245–274. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, Pilar. 2010. “The YouTubification of Politics, Impoliteness and Polarization.” In Handbook of Research on Discourse Behavior and Digital Communication: Language Structures and Social Interaction, edited by Rotimi Taiwo, 540–563. Hershey: Information Science Reference. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Georgalou, Mariza. 2017. Discourse and Identity on Facebook. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Graham, Sage L., and Claire Hardaker. 2017. “(Im)politeness in Digital Communication.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness, edited by Jonathan Culpeper, Michael Haugh and Dániel Z. Kádár, 785–814. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hardaker, Claire. 2010. “Trolling in Asynchronous Computer-mediated Communication: From User Discussions to Academic Definitions.” Journal of Politeness Research 6(2):215–242. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harris, Sandra. 2001. “Being Politically Impolite: Extending Politeness Theory to Adversarial Political Discourse.” Discourse & Society 121:451–472. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hatzidaki, Ourania. 2011. “Greek Men’s and Women’s Magazines as Codes of Gender Conduct: The Appropriation and Hybridisation of Deontic Modality.” In Living with Patriarchy – Discursive Constructions of Gendered Subjects across Public Spheres, edited by Danijela Majstorovic and Inger Lassen, 113–144. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Herring, Susan C. 2008. “Computer-mediated Discourse.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen and Heidi E. Hamilton, 612–634. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kiesler, Sara, Jane Siegel, and Timothy W. McGuire. 1984. “Social Psychological Aspects of Computer-mediated Communication.” American Psychologist 39(10):1123–1134. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ksiazek, Thomas. B., and Limor Peer. 2016. “User Comments and Civility on YouTube.” In The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies, edited by Bob Franklin and Scott A. Eldridge, 244–252. London: Taylor & Francis. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lange, Patricia G. 2014. “Commenting on YouTube Rants: Perceptions of Inappropriateness or Civic Engagement?” Journal of Pragmatics 731:53–65. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lorenzo-Dus, Nuria, Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, and Patricia Bou-Franch. 2011. “On-line Polylogues and Impoliteness: The Case of Postings Sent in Response to the Obama Reggaeton YouTube Video.” Journal of Pragmatics 43(10):2578–2593. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Meredith, Joanne. 2017. “Analysing Technological Affordances of Online Interactions Using Conversation Analysis.” Journal of Pragmatics 1151:42–55. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mills, Richard A. 2018. “Pop-up Political Advocacy Communities on Reddit.com: SandersForPresident and The Donald.” AI and Society 33(1):39–54. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moor, Peter J., Ard Heuvelman, and Ria Verleur. 2010. “Flaming on YouTube.” Computers in Human Behavior 26(6):1536–1546. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Murthy, Dhiraj, Sawyer Bowman, Alexander J. Gross, and Marisa McGarry. 2015. “Do we Tweet Differently from our Mobile Devices? A Study of Language Differences on Mobile and Web-based Twitter Platforms.” Journal of Communication 65(5):816–837. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mutz, Diana C. 2015. In-your-face Politics: The Consequences of Uncivil Media. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Papacharissi, Zizi. 2002. “The Virtual Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere.” New Media and Society 4(1):9–27. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reeves, Byron, and Clifford C. Nass. 1996. The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1991. “Reflections on Talk and Social Structure.” In Talk and Social Structure, edited by Deirdre Boden and Don H. Zimmerman, 44–70. Berkley: University of California Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sifianou, Maria. 2012. “Disagreements, Face and Politeness.” Journal of Pragmatics 44(12):1554–1564. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Singer, Philipp, Fabian Flöck, Clemens Meinhart, Elias Zeitfogel, and Markus Strohmaier. 2014. “Evolution of Reddit: From the Front Page of the Internet to a Self-referential Community?” In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on World Wide Web – WWW 2014. Seoul, South Korea: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): 517–522. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Suran, Melissa, and Danielle K. Kilgo. 2017. “Freedom from the Press? How Anonymous Gatekeepers on Reddit Covered the Boston Marathon Bombing.” Journalism Studies 18(8):1035–1051. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sydnor, Emily. 2018. “Platforms for Incivility: Examining Perceptions across Different Media Formats.” Political Communication 35(1):97–116. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Taleghani-Nikazm, Carmen. 2012. “Politeness in Computer-mediated Communication.” In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, edited by Carol A. Chappelle, 4463–4468. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Taylor, Charlotte. 2017. “The Relationship between Irony and Sarcasm: Insights from a First-order Metalanguage Investigation.” Journal of Politeness Research 13(2):209–241. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Vergis, Nikos, and Marina Terkourafi. 2015. “The M-word: A Greek Collocation between Solidarity and Insult.” In Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Im/politeness, edited by Marina Terkourafi, 41–70. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Watts, Richard. 1989. “Relevance and Relational Work: Linguistic Politeness as Politic Behavior.” Multilingua 81:131–166. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Young, Li-Yin. 2018. “The Effect of Moderator Bots on Abusive Language Use.” In Proceedings of the 2018 International Conference on Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence – PRAI 2018. Kean University Union, United States: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM): 133–137. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zappavigna, Michele. 2012. Discourse of Twitter and Social Media: How we Use Language to Create Affiliation on the Web. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (8)

Cited by eight other publications

Del Saz Rubio, Maria Milagros
2025. ‘You are not empowered, you have neither character nor pride’. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 13:2 ► pp. 335 ff. DOI logo
Faria, Rita
2025. “Stop measuring egos”. In Beyond Binaries in Address Research [Topics in Address Research, 6], ► pp. 220 ff. DOI logo
Kulik, Maciej, Katarzyna Budzynska, He Zhang, Marie-Amélie Paquin & Barbara Konat
2025. Offensive language in reactions to public figures in polarised discourse online. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict DOI logo
Vasist, Pramukh Nanjundaswamy, Satish Krishnan & Prafulla Agnihotri
2025. The unfolding of geopolitical tensions on social networks: a social network analysis of Twitter and Reddit conversations. Internet Research DOI logo
Sindhu, A., D. Jayakumar, S. Sasivardhini, M. O. Ramkumar & R. Rajmohan
2024. 2024 Third International Conference on Smart Technologies and Systems for Next Generation Computing (ICSTSN), ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Saz-Rubio, Ma Milagros del
2023. Assessing impoliteness-related language in response to a season's greeting posted by the Spanish and English Prime Ministers on Twitter. Journal of Pragmatics 206 ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo
Tajeddin, Zia & Hojjat Rassaei Moqadam
2023. Perception of impoliteness in refusal and response to it by native speakers of English and Persian. Russian Journal of Linguistics 27:1 ► pp. 88 ff. DOI logo
Kavroulaki, Evanthia
2022. “Congratulations! You just won the title for ‘worse Tinder opening line’”. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 10:1 ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue