혐오와 혐오가 만날 때: 온라인 커뮤니티에 나타난 정치 혐오 및 사회 혐오 키워드의 결합에 대한 분석 = When Hate Meets Hate: The Association of Political and Social Hateful Keywords in Online Communities

국문 초록 (Abstract)

온라인 커뮤니티는 민주적 소통의 공간으로 주목받았으나 동시에 갈등 및 혐오의 온상으로 지적되어 오기도 했다. 기존의 연구들은 정치적 양극화에 따라 나타나는 상대 당파에 대한 혐오, 이민자의 증가에 따라 등장하는 외국인 혐오, 또는 사회적 균열의 축을 따라 팽창하는 젠더 기반 혐오 및 세대 기반 혐오 등에 각기 주목해왔다. 이러한 연구들을 바탕으로 본 연구는 이러한 혐오의 축들이 어떻게 교차하는지, 혐오 키워드들이 어떻게 결합하는지에 대해 분석했다. 우선 11개의 주요 온라인 커뮤니티에서 2016년에서 2022년 사이에 작성된, 혐오 키워드를 포함하는 게시글들을 모두 수집한 후, 정리된 빅데이터를 바탕으로 주제 별 혐오 키워드들이 다른 혐오 키워드들과 함께 이용되는 양태를 양적으로 살펴보고 직접 혐오 키워드들이 결합된 문장들에 대한 질적 분석을 수행했다. 분석 결과, (1) 진보 진영에 대한 혐오가 나이 든 세대에 대한 혐오와 결합하는 양상, (2) 중국, 이슬람, 동남아 등 각기 다른 민족에 대한 혐오가 서로 맞물리며 진보 진영에 대한 혐오와 만나는 양상, 그리고 (3) 여성에 대한 혐오가 진보 진영에 대한 혐오와 결합하는 양상을 발견할 수 있었다. 나아가, 텍스트에 대한 질적 분석을 통해, 사회적 갈등과 혐오가 정치적 양극화 및 상대 정파에 대한 혐오와 만나 증폭되고 있는 양태를 구체적으로 확인할 수 있었다. 본 연구는 정치적 양극화와 사회적 양극화가 맞물리는 가운데 혐오의 정치가 정치, 사회, 문화에 걸쳐 퍼져있음을 이해하는데 있어 이론적, 실질적 함의를 지닌다.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The internet has been identified as a new sphere of civil society. With the rise of information and communication technology, online and social media platforms have been celebrated as a democratic platform to facilitate interpersonal and intergroup communication. At the same time, however, there has also been alarming evidence of the darker aspect of online communication. Previous studies have reported that public opinions expressed on online platforms are polarized through the echo chamber effect—the tendency of online users to favor information supporting their preexisting opinions. Research has further suggested that online polarization subsequently leads to the spread of misinformation, strengthening people’s stereotypes toward other social groups. As online expression has become contentiously polarized, online and social media platforms have increasingly been criticized as a reservoir of group conflict and hatred.
As online hate speech against various groups has been increasingly visible on online and social media platforms, a vast majority of research has focused on the role of social media platforms, such as X or Facebook, in spreading hate. Social media is indeed one of the important online platforms that facilitates the person-to-person diffusion of expressions. To study online platforms as a new public sphere, however, the unique role of online-based communities requires further attention. As an amorphous group of individuals who express opinions based on a sense of belonging, online communities fall within the definition of the public sphere, a social space for all individuals to gather and share their opinions and thoughts. While these internet-based communities, such as Reddit, are less visible to the general public than social media platforms, they have served as important platforms for online users to generate and spread hate. Despite its importance in understanding the spread of hateful expressions, online-based communities have yet to receive full attention from the scholarship of online hate.
In studying online communities, we pay attention to how hateful keywords toward different social groups appear simultaneously in real contexts within these communities. Whereas past studies on online hate speech have focused on the emergence of hate politics in times of heightened political polarization, growing xenophobia followed by increasing number of immigrants and refugees, or the rising expression of gender-based and age-based hatred respectively, our study examines how these axes of political and social hatred intersect with each other through the association of various hateful keywords in online communities.
We choose online communities in South Korea as our case since the country is known for its growing political polarization as well as vibrant online communities. After collecting a comprehensive data of 396,496 postings that include hateful keywords, we conducted both social network and qualitative analyses to investigate the co-occurrence of these keywords. Our results show that (1) hatred on the Democratic Party of Korea is combined with hatred on the elderly, (2) xenophobia towards Chinese, Muslim, and Southeast Asian people is associated with the progressive, and (3) hatred on women and progressives cooccur in hateful expressions. Our qualitative text analysis reinforces these findings by showing how various forms of social hatred is exacerbated in combination with political hatred. Our study provides implication to understand the prevalence of hate politics in times of social and political polarization in South Korea.