Hate Speech in YouTube Comments on Douglas Murray’s The Woke Agenda

In the digital era, social media platforms have become major spaces for public
discussion, particularly on controversial ideological issues, but they also facilitate the
spread of hate speech through user-generated comments. YouTube, as one of the most
influential platforms, often hosts intense debates that reflect social prejudice and
ideological conflict. This research is conducted to identify the forms of hate speech
found in the comment section of YouTube videos featuring Douglas Murray’s
discussion of the woke agenda. It also seeks to explain the way these hateful
expressions are shaped and delivered through specific lexical and syntactic features.
The analysis is guided by Mondal, Silva, and Benevenuto’s (2017) hate speech
typology to identify the targets of hate, and Halliday’s concept of linguistic realization
to explain how lexical and syntactic choices construct hateful meaning. This study uses
a descriptive qualitative design and works with fifty comments that were purposively
taken from several YouTube videos discussing the woke agenda. The review of the
comments shows that the data contains eight distinct types of hate speech. The most
recurring forms target are gender, behavior, and religion, while class-based hate speech
did not appear in any of the collected comments. This is likely because the discussion
is centered on ideological and identity issues related to the woke agenda. The linguistic
analysis reveals that hate speech is commonly expressed through evaluative and
emotionally loaded lexical choices, as well as declarative and imperative syntactic
structures that present prejudice as certainty or command. Based on these findings, this
study suggests that future research should include a wider range of platforms or
multimodal elements to understand hate speech more comprehensively, and that social
media moderators and educators should develop clearer strategies for identifying
linguistic patterns that signal discriminatory or hostile online behavior.