Online Toxic Speech as Positioning Acts: Hate as Discursive Mechanisms for Othering and Belonging
Researchers collected 98,729 posts from a Colombian Telegram group, identified 3,155 toxic posts and thematically analysed 1,258. Toxic speech reinforced group boundaries around security and migration but contested them around politics, gender and sexuality.
Peer-reviewed publication
VerifiedPublished in New Media & Society.
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Executive summary
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The study used Communalytic to collect 98,729 public posts from the Colombian Telegram group Chismes Frescos Medellín. A Detoxify classifier retained 3,221 posts above a toxicity threshold of 0.7; manual validation removed 66 misclassifications, leaving 3,155 toxic posts.
Researchers focused qualitative thematic analysis on 1,258 posts across the four most common topics: security, politics, migration, and gender and sexuality. Toxic speech around security and migration tended to enforce shared moral boundaries and suppress dissent, including dehumanising criminals and migrants. Political and gender-related conversations showed more fragmented viewpoints, with toxic speech used to contest competing definitions of group values.
The paper concludes that toxic speech is not only an attack on outsiders but also a mechanism for negotiating membership and belonging. It argues that effective moderation requires contextual judgement rather than treating every instance of harsh language as equivalent.
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