Forging Hate Speech Differently: A Comparative Analysis of Japan and Korea

Abstract

Hate Speech expresses and incites hatred against a person or a group of individuals on a basis of particular features such as race, nationality, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. With the development of the Internet communication today, hate speech has expanded into cyberspace. Following the precedents in America and Europe, far-rightists in Japan and Korea also began to spread hate speech over the Internet. Netouyo in Japan and Ilbe in Korea are both known as far-right hate speech groups on the Internet. Netouyo is known to primarily target the Korean and the Chinese - foreign groups, while Ilbe is known to mainly target females, people from Jeolla province, and leftists - domestic groups. The purpose of this paper is to compare hate speech of Netouyo and Ilbe and then explain how the two groups distinctively selected their targets. For the comparative analysis, comments of hate speech were collected from the two groups websites and classified according to each target and the developmental stages of hate speech. Frequently appearing keywords were also selected and counted to analyze contents of hate speech in the framework of the integrated threat theory. From this analysis, it was shown that Netouyos hate speech is more frequent than Ilbes while Ilbes hate speech is more severe in terms of the levels of hate speech than Netouyos. Moreover, it was observed that the two hate speech groups both had negative stereotypes of their targets but perceived contrasting kinds of specific threats from the targets, which led them to select distinctive targets.