AN ANALYSIS OF COMMENTS CONTAINING HATE SPEECH: FACEBOOK AND THE DELFI NEWS PORTAL

News portals and social networking exert a powerful influence on contemporary society. In order to attract as many readers as possible, news agencies publish the same articles on their websites and on social networking platforms. This is a two-way form of communication where users have the opportunity to express their opinions by commenting on an article in many different news portals and social networks. The comments can add to the users’ knowledge and shape their opinions. The problem is that hate speech tends to proliferate in the comments under the articles after they are published. The purpose of the present article is to analyze the peculiarities of hate speech commenting on the Delfi news portal and in the Facebook social network. The academic article presents a limited quantitative and qualitative analysis of Delfi, the most popular Lithuanian news portal, and of the social network known as Facebook, where the author(s) will attempt to identify hateful comments in accordance with certain pre-established criteria and to compare their numbers. The subject matter of the articles published by news portals has a great influence on the number and content of the respective comments. Three topics were chosen for the study: politics, crime and the life of celebrities. The comments chosen for analysis on the Delfi news portal are anonymous, as anonymous commenting is related to freedom of speech, but often promotes hate speech. The article discusses the theoretical aspects of hate speech, examines the options connected to commenting on the Delfi news portal and in the Facebook social network, and evaluates the associated privacy policy. The findings and recommendations of the study have practical implications for reducing hate speech on the Internet.