Analysis of hate speech and uncivil speech in harmful memes: a political perspective on virtual comedy

• Grant number: 25/09715-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: July 01, 2025
• End date: December 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science
• Principal Investigator: Sylvia Iasulaitis
• Grantee: Raquel Vitória do Rio Coleta
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 22/03090-0 - Analysis of large amounts of political data and complex networks: mining modelling and applications in Computational Political Science, AP.PNGP.PI

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the use of harmful memes in online interaction spaces, seeking to contribute to the delineation and identification of hate speech and uncivil speech in multimodal artifacts (memes), a language widely used by users on social networks today, but which is little investigated as a powerful resource for perpetuating violence and prejudice. To this end, the concepts of hate speech, uncivil speech and harmful memes will be evoked in order to, first, observe how they are produced in the meme model and, then, to weave a critical analysis of the discourse of harmful memes together with the creation of a table disclosing the prejudiced memes analyzed in the categories in which they fit, thus making it possible to visualize and problematize the quantity and recurrence of these memes. The corpus of the analysis is composed of 50 memes selected from the database of the INTERFACES research group (Center for Sociopolitical Studies of Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence). In addition to the theoretical concepts, a methodological analysis developed in the Memeteca project will also be presented and used to define and identify the configurations of memes and harmful memes that will be worked on.