Argumentation and misogynist discourse on social media

Abstract

This article explores misogynistic discourse as a growing form of hate speech on social networks, especially in the political sphere. From a theoretical-analytical point of view, the research is situated in the field of argumentation studies and Discourse Analysis, in addition to drawing on work on digital discourses. In this text, the “small corpus” (Moirand, 2020), which will support the reflection, is made up of posts on the social network Twitter [currently X], in which two prominent politicians denounce the violence they have suffered. The selection of the posts and some of the responses to them is important in the article because of their representativeness, as they are “emerging forms” (Moirand, 2020) of the issue addressed. The Twitter/X social network was chosen for its ability to bring together a large and diverse number of followers and for providing faster contact between them through short and concise language. All this makes this network a favorable environment for disagreements of all kinds, for polemics, verbal violence and hate speech.