| Keywords [eng] |
hate speech, Fox News, LGBTQ+, Facebook comments, Discourse-Historical Approach, neapykantos kalba, Fox News, LGBTQ+, Facebook komentarai, diskurso istorinė prieiga |
| Abstract [eng] |
This master’s thesis examines how anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech is discursively constructed in comments under Fox News Facebook posts. Hate speech in digital environments has become an increasingly visible form of public discourse: it circulates rapidly across social media platforms, becomes embedded in online communication and remains difficult to moderate. This issue is particularly relevant in the context of the United States of America, where such speech is broadly protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The analysis conducted in this thesis seeks to extend existing qualitative and discourse-oriented research beyond predominantly European contexts and to draw attention to the Facebook comment sections of US news media as publicly visible spaces in which the marginalisation of LGBTQ+ people may be reinforced. The dataset consists of 2,000 comments collected from 40 selected posts published between June and December 2025. The comments selected for analysis had to meet the operational definition of hate speech established in the thesis. The comments were analysed according to five discursive strategies of the Discourse-Historical Approach: nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivisation and intensification/mitigation. The qualitative analysis was supplemented by quantitative counts of the strategies and their devices. In addition, a corpus linguistics analysis of keywords and n-grams was carried out in order to verify whether the main qualitative findings were reflected in broader lexical and phraseological patterns in the corpus. The findings show that anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech is realised through all five discursive strategies and operates as a structured, multidimensional discourse combining nomination, negative evaluation, justification, stance-taking and rhetorical intensification. The most frequent strategy was predication, indicating that commenters particularly often assigned negative qualities to LGBTQ+ people by representing them as false, disordered, abnormal, dangerous or socially, morally and religiously unacceptable. Argumentation and nomination were the next two most frequent strategies, showing that hate speech was often justified through recurring topoi, while LGBTQ+ people were frequently named in ways based on stigmatising, pathologising, derogatory or re-gendering practices. Particularly prominent were pathologisation, delegitimation and anti-trans models, realised through biological-essentialist, binary-sex, misgendering, child-protection, religious, fairness-based and exclusionary framings. The corpus linguistics analysis confirmed that these patterns were also reflected in recurring lexical and phraseological patterns, demonstrating that comment sections function as spaces in which marginalising representations of LGBTQ+ people are reproduced and normalised. |
