Politically motivated hate speech in Albanian language social media

The research addresses politically motivated hate speech in Albanian-language triggered by recent political events. An evident reactive hate dominates the comment section of political news outlet in social media, so that one is moved to detect the underlying partisan motivations of this hostility. Some comments provide answers and others suggest reasons that reflect a spreading animosity towards politics and its traditional or emerging actors. Robert Entman’s frame paradigm offers a theoretical foundation to detect hate speech embedded in mediated interaction in digital platforms. This research combines framing with interpretative insights derived from critical discourse analysis to capture deeper causal logics embedded in frames as a communicating text. Findings reveal that politically motivated hate speech is often normalized and legitimized in digital interaction when it is frames around some thematic issues such as national identity, moral values, economic development. Hate speech targets include political actors and institutions, collective outer groups in some cases. Recurring narrative patterns highlight responsibility attribution and negative moral evaluation, which reinforce shared perceptions about political legitimacy, and underlying legacy. The research suggests that a context-sensitive approach when addressing hate speech detection helps to understand mechanisms of its construction in order to design preventive initiatives.