Insight Mosaic e-Megazine (First Edition)

Habibah Ismail & Siti Nur Baiin Che Harun Lecturer, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM) Language Teacher, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM) habibah.ismail@usim.edu.my, sitinurbaiin@usim.edu.my SCROLLING INTO HATE LINGUISTIC VIOLENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA INTRODUCTION As we scroll through our social media feeds, it is hard not to notice the flood of hate speech that emerges whenever controversial or sensational topics arise. Some users shy away, others remain silent observers, while a vocal few dive into the fray either to mediate or to escalate tensions. But what does engaging with or merely witnessing hate speech do to us? From a linguistic perspective, hate speech refers to language that expresses, incites, or legitimizes discrimination, hostility, or violence against individuals or groups based on attributes like race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or other identity markers. It often includes derogatory labels, dehumanizing metaphors, and rhetorical strategies that entrench social divisions and reinforce power imbalances. Whether we call it hate lingo, Habibah Ismail is a lecturer at the Faculty of Major Languages Studies, Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM). She has a bachelor’s degree in TESL (UKM), a master’s degree in ELS (UKM), and a doctoral degree in Linguistics (University of Sydney). Her research into media texts combines corpus linguistics with other methodologies, mainly discourse analysis and multimodal analysis, to explore the language of news and new media platforms (social media). 17