Ageist propaganda on social media: disguising hate speech through mock politeness

Abstract

This article intends to analyse how mock politeness strategies signal the expression of ageist propaganda in online news commentary. By resorting to a subset of the netlang hate speech corpus, composed of user-generated texts posted on the comment boards of the Daily Mail news website, namely in response to articles dealing with sensitive age-related issues, the article looks into the disguised ways in which ageism is voiced. More specifically, it examines four different types of politeness strategies – thanking, complimenting, agreeing, and apologising – and assesses whether their positive and negative face-enhancing function is genuine or, as the hypothesis goes, insincere, hence strategic and manipulative, playing a triggering role in the expression of prejudice. The findings confirm the occurrence of pragmatic mismatch, as anticipated in the literature on mock politeness, and reveal a two-phase process under which it is accomplished. The article thus hopes to shed light on a relatively neglected aspect of im/politeness studies, by describing devious realizations of politeness strategies through both formulaic and creative language. At the same time, it hopes to contribute to understanding the exploitation of polite speech acts for propagandistic, potentially harmful, ideological effects regarding an equally neglected social group in hate speech research.