Moral Disaffiliation in Cyber Incitement to Hatred and Violence: A Discourse Semantic Approach

Incitement to hatred and terrorist acts, a key aspect of illegal online content, is a critical cybercrime facing the global community. Contributing to the limited forensic linguistic research into the moral motivations of terrorist cyber incitement, this chapter examines how social ‘disaffiliation’ (i.e. communal disalignment with victims) is enacted and its moral foundation activated in online incitement texts made by two jihadists and one far-rightist. The chapter applies a discourse semantic approach to incitement to examine how semantic structures of violent extremist discourse () serve in moral coercion into violence. The findings reveal: (i) key social bonds at stake, realised in the extremists’ appraisal signature as collocating values—i.e. axiological meanings and positively charged ‘we’ versus negatively charged ‘they’; and (ii) inciter-incitee-victims’ relationships and interpersonal treatment that are regulated and underpinned by a discursively constructed moral order of six meta-values that the extremists endorse. The analytical strategy adds a linguistic method to criminal investigative analysis of offenders’ motives for cybercrimes, and to extremists’ moral values analysis (MVA)—identifying the predispositions and assumptions that an extremist relies upon to position people within relational/actional (i.e. bonds/obligations) off-/online networks.