ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the complex narrative strategies of the testimonial documentary The Internet Warriors (2017) that aims at understanding the motivations and social contexts behind the people who daily confront the Internet regarding identities, political beliefs, or religious values. Through multimodal discourse analysis, we challenge the traditional “textualist” and “normative” analyses of hate speech to interpret it from the realities and media appropriations of online haters thanks to the concept of “media practice”. This theoretical framework helps to interpret their identities and backgrounds, their argumentative strategies, and their online and offline interactions. We conclude arguing that online hate speech is a dialectic process that confronts victims and prosecutors, who may also become hate mongers when they feel challenged and need to defend their beliefs.
