Verbal violence in a discussion forum for 18-25 year halls. How do young people judge messages?

This article studies verbal violence in digital communication, from mere rudeness to hate speech, by examining the judgements of young Internet users. Two different approaches, discursive and psycho-social, were used to explore how young people perceive verbal violence online. A corpus of messages from a French-language forum, known for its aggressiveness, was analysed to identify the types of messages that elicit metapragmatic comments, and the communication norms that can be deduced from these comments. In addition, a group of students completed a questionnaire to evaluate a sample of forum messages. The results highlight the importance of local norms in evaluating the verbal violence, rudeness and hate speech contained in messages. Those considered violent from a normative point of view are not necessarily perceived as such by young people. In addition, this study indicates differences in the perception of online verbal violence according to gender and knowledge of the forum.