From Flaming to Incited Crime: Recognising Cyberbullying on Chinese WeChat Account
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From Flaming to Incited Crime: Recognising Cyberbullying on Chinese WeChat Account Shaomin Zhang1 Accepted: 6 October 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Cyberbullying involves the use of ICTs (information and communication technologies) to carry out an act or a series of acts intended to harm victims emotionally [12, p. 288]. As a crucial type of cyberbullying, flaming is also intended for emotional harm to victims [10, p. 419]. WeChat subscription accounts, as one kind of the most popular social media in China, are a perfect venue for flaming. WeChat account writers are permitted to post their attitudes which may contain flaming language under the veil of legitimate account. Sometimes such flaming language may further incite crimes or moral wrongs. However, the potential harmful effect and the underlying risk of incitement become invisible and have been paid little attention. In order to reveal the flaming nature of WeChat accounts, twenty-six suspect articles from a Chinese Wechat subscription account are analysed from the perspectives of corpus linguistics and pragmatics. As a result, linguistic clues to flaming (cyberbullying) are recognised, and related legal issues concerning internet incitement are addressed. Specifically, it is found that: firstly, the linguistic manifestations of the invisible flaming could be revealed in terms of keywords, semantic prosodies and speech acts; secondly, the flamer is very good at formulating some emotionally harmful keywords and semantic prosodies into his attitudes and imposing them upon the readers; thirdly, language crime of incitement requires only the inciter’s illocutionary act, i.e., intention, rather than the outcome of the incitement. These results suggest that linguistic approach helps in penetrating and recognising flaming (cyberbullying) articles in Chinese social media for protecting the mass audience from being fallen victims. Besides, the results also provide some implications on social media laws and regulations in mainland China. Keywords Cyberbullying · Flaming · Social media · Keywords · Semantic prosody · Speech act
* Shaomin Zhang [email protected] 1
School of English for International Business, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China
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1 Introduction 1.1 Background Information: A Trace of Evidence for Flaming And Incitement One of my registered Chinese Wechat accounts has been blocked by the author of the account on August 10th, 2018, forever because I gave the author some dissenting opinion. The topic of the article on that day is “To poison dogs with isoniazid will become an ordinary private remedy, but there are risks”. The mere topic sounds cruel and painful enough to make some of the audience tremble. Many people who were the subscribers of this account have been blocked for the same reason. Worst of all, many stray dogs are reported poisoned to death by ham with some unknown medicine in it afterwards. The unknown medicine is alleged to be isoniazid. The isoniazid is clinically used
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