Location
Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii
Event Website
https://hicss.hawaii.edu/
Start Date
7-1-2025 12:00 AM
End Date
10-1-2025 12:00 AM
Description
Emojis are a ubiquitous form of online expression. In this paper, we explore emojis as affordances that enact and sustain discursive violence via toxic content. We take a case study approach by focusing on Chismes Frescos Medellin (Fresh Gossip Medellin), a Colombian Telegram group with over 125,676 members. Relying on Communalytic, we collected 98,729 publicly accessible posts. Next, we subdivided the posts into 3,155 toxic and 95,574 non-toxic posts using Detoxify, a popular machine-learning classifier. We explored and compared the two subsets through statistical analysis and thematic analysis. Our findings show that emojis—and specifically, emojis suggesting positive emotions such as �� and ��—are often used to accompany toxic speech in ways that indicate the approval and normalization of toxic speech. Overall, our study points to the need to pay closer attention to how affordances can enable symbolic forms of violence on digital platforms in unexpected ways.
Recommended Citation
Morales, Esteban; Hodson, Jaigris; Gruzd, Anatoliy; and Mai, Philip, "I �� your Hate: Emojis as Infrastructural Platform Violence on Telegram" (2025). Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2025 (HICSS-58). 8.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-58/dsm/conversation/8
I �� your Hate: Emojis as Infrastructural Platform Violence on Telegram
Hilton Waikoloa Village, Hawaii
Emojis are a ubiquitous form of online expression. In this paper, we explore emojis as affordances that enact and sustain discursive violence via toxic content. We take a case study approach by focusing on Chismes Frescos Medellin (Fresh Gossip Medellin), a Colombian Telegram group with over 125,676 members. Relying on Communalytic, we collected 98,729 publicly accessible posts. Next, we subdivided the posts into 3,155 toxic and 95,574 non-toxic posts using Detoxify, a popular machine-learning classifier. We explored and compared the two subsets through statistical analysis and thematic analysis. Our findings show that emojis—and specifically, emojis suggesting positive emotions such as �� and ��—are often used to accompany toxic speech in ways that indicate the approval and normalization of toxic speech. Overall, our study points to the need to pay closer attention to how affordances can enable symbolic forms of violence on digital platforms in unexpected ways.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-58/dsm/conversation/8