Verbal aggression as a communication strategy in digital society

Verbal aggression has emerged as a communication strategy in the digital media space today. However, there is a lack of empirical studies in the context of Russian mass media, especially assessing verbal aggression in online media with quantitative or qualitative content-analysis. This study addresses this gap in research literature. The authors have collected data of 164 posts and 38416 comments from the web-site of “Echo of Moscow” in 2014 on the topic of the Ukraine crisis. The crisis was observed in the posts by means of binary opposition “we” versus “they”. The content analysis carried out by the authors revealed that only 17.07% of posts do not contain verbal aggression. Verbal aggression usually includes insulting rhetorics, discreditation of opponents, prosecuting, blaming, threatening, negative forecasting, etc.