Verbreitungsmechanismen schädigender Sprache im Netz: Anatomie zweier
  Shitstorms
Tatjana Scheffler Veronika Solopova Mihaela Popa-Wyatt
In this working paper, we turn our attention to two exemplary, cross-media
shitstorms directed against well-known individuals from the business world.
Both have in common, first, the trigger, a controversial statement by the
person who thereby becomes the target of the shitstorm, and second, the
identity of this target as relatively privileged: cis-male, white, successful.
We examine the spread of the outrage wave across two media at a time and test
the applicability of computational linguistic methods for analyzing its time
course. Assuming that harmful language spreads like a virus in digital space,
we are primarily interested in the events and constellations that lead to the
use of harmful language, and whether and how a linguistic formation of "tribes"
occurs. Our research therefore focuses, first, on the distribution of
linguistic features within the overall shitstorm: are individual words or
phrases increasingly used after their introduction, and through which pathways
they spread. Second, we ask whether "tribes," for example, one group of
supporters and one of opponents of the target, have a distinguished linguistic
form. Our hypothesis is that supporters remain equally active over time, while
the dynamic "ripple" effect of the shitstorm is based on the varying
participation of opponents.