Cyberbullying and hate speech in the debate around the ratification of the Istanbul convention in Bulgaria: a semiotic analysis of the communication dynamics
Kristian Bankov · Social Semiotics · 2020
In 2018 the Bulgarian Constitutional Court declared the Istanbul Convention (IC) unconstitutional. This decision was taken after several months of fierce public debate in Bulgaria over the implications of IC adoption. The debate was overwhelmed by the populist position rejecting this convention. From this debate the word “gender,” literally transcribed in Cyrillic letters (джендър) and having no direct translation in Bulgarian, not only became a neologism with strongly offensive connotations towards LGBT community, but also a general insult. The populist position in this debate, which won the majority population support, was supported by an impressive variety of rhetorical means, most of which were pure examples of cyberbullying. Then I propose a diachronic mirror model showing alphabet evolution to reach the domesticated mind phase, as well as the reverse process just after the Internet advent, with creative undomestication of mind from a simplified online writing through emoticons and emojis, to GIFs and Internet memes. I will demonstrate that although cyber offenders act alone before their computers, their behavior is determined by crowd psychology factors (e-crowd), making them less responsible for their behavior. Some characteristics of the so-called post-truth era are seen as a consequence of this mechanism..