Counter-Speech on Israel-Hamas Conflict News Comments

Abstract

Israel-Hamas conflict has been a worldwide issue and its news on social media raised various responses on Instagram's comment section. Counter-speech comments are found on Instagram in most of hate speech comments. The present study aims to determine the types of counter-speech’s exchanges and its strategy found on Instagram comment section towards Israel and Hamas conflict news also investigate the perceptions of social group about Israel and Hamas. Sociolinguistic and Perspectives theory used to examine respondents' views and Counter-speech theory used to classify counter-speech interactions and tactics/strategy. This qualitative study used documentary as data collection methodology to select the data on BBC Instagram account’s comments and interview were done to seven respondents as Instagram users from Indonesia. This study examined the data using thematic analysis and qualitative content analysis. The result shows that: (1) two exchanges type of counter-speech used in the comment section namely One-to-One and One-to-Many; (2) the counter-speech comment contained all strategy that was dominantly used Pointing Out Hypocrisy or Contradictions and Presentation of Facts to Correct Misstatements or Misperceptions; and (3) social identification namely Racial and Ethnic Identification and social evaluation namely Word Choice are more impactful. The conclusion is that counter-speech as a multi-faced strategy employs a variety of tactics to combat hate-speech towards Israel-Hamas conflict news. It is also suggest that Instagram users should use a proper language choice and emotional tone to give a direct and informative counter-speech comments to get a better perspective from readers about the news.