Abstract

SEARA, Isabel Roboredo  and  CABRAL, Ana Lúcia Tinoco. Barbarus ad portas: the verbal aggression in comments on the social network Facebook. Comunicação e Sociedade [online]. 2020, vol.38, pp.139-160. ISSN 1645-2089.  https://doi.org/10.17231/comsoc.38(2020).2588.

The paper discusses the problematic of the representation of refugee migrants in Europe, Portugal, and in Latin America, Brazil. Focusing on verbal violence on the web, the work analyzes comments from Facebook users, highlighting the ad hominem argument as a strategy to denigrate the image of the refugees, the paper notes two forms of materialization of this argument: personal direct attack and indirect personal attack. The verbal strategies that allow disqualify refugee migrants and represent them negatively. The theoretical framework is a tributary of discourse analysis in dialogue whith rhetoric represented by Amossy (1999, 2014b) among others, complemented by studies on interaction in social networks (Castells, 2013), and verbal violence (Culpeper, 2008; Bousfield, 2008), in particular verbal violence in internet and social networks (Castells, 2013; Rodeghiero, 2012). The discursive-pragmatic analysis was carried out in a corpus of messages on Facebook, collected between July and August 2017, about the migratory crisis in Europe, and collected in August 2018, about the immigration of Venezuelans to Brazi. The study allows us to prove that, in a era when social networks dissiminate and spread, thtough the written word, the freee opinions of those who previously did not have achievement to the public expression of tehir opinion, devaluing and agressive strategies dominate comments on social networks and transmit positions that aim to exclude the migran, considered as disturbing an established order.

Keywords : verbal violence; ad hominem argument; social networks; Facebook; migrants; refugees.

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