Manifestations of impoliteness and verbal violence in the digital opinion forums of Spanish newspapers

Abstract

It has been getting more and more common among the Spanish newspapers that publish their contents also in Internet, the practice to let the readers show their opinions about a different sort of news. As we will try to demonstrate with this study, the possibility to carry out this enunciative act in the anonymity allows an uninhibited communication and favours the use of several strategies of impoliteness in order to damage the social face of the reference of the new –in most of the cases, a public person–, the one of the mass media or the social face of other visitors who intervene also in these forums of opinion.