I👍 your Hate: Emojis as Infrastructural Platform Violence on Telegram
Article / Journal
Author(s):
Anatoliy Gruzd
,
Esteban Morales
,
Jaigris Hodson
,
Philip Mai
Year: 2025
Abstract:
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.
Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein