Content Analysis in the Research Field of Incivility and Hate Speech in Online Communication

The origins of research on incivility and hate speech can be traced back to the question of what qualities public communication should have in order to establish and maintain a democratic society. Democracy and public sphere theorists have presented different answers to this question and accordingly developed different concepts of civility. Incivility is a controversial concept associated with a wide spectrum of behaviors. Based on the different theoretical concepts, different indicators of incivility have been used. This chapter summarizes previous theoretical approaches and provides an overview of existing content analytic studies of incivility in online user-generated communication