Digital Interactions: Conflict, Argumentation, and Verbal Abuse on Social Media

Web performance is a vast and fruitful field for research in a wide range of scientific areas, especially linguistics. We are interested in the linguistic behaviour of social media users, particularly on Facebook; we investigate how people interact, take sides in debates, argue, defend points of view, act in controversies. Starting from the question of whether the high visibility of interactions on social media changes the status of abuse in situations of argumentative controversy such as polemics, we investigate how abuse builds up on social media, particularly in interactions marked by dissent, namely controversies. In this sense, we observe how the passions, the pathos, especially expressed through verbal abuse, prevail in these interactions.