“Her leg didn’t fully load in”: A digitally mediated social semiotic critical discourse analysis of disability hate speech on TikTok

Hate Speech Online (HSO) seems to be the result of the degeneration of the ’freedom of expression’ into the ‘freedom for discrimination’ that finds its major amplification on social media where some people use anonymity as a tool to exercise power and dominance over other people. Drawing on a digitally mediated Social Semiotic Critical Discourse Analysis, this study investigates a specific, under researched form of HSO, namely Disability Hate Speech (DHS) by analysing a corpus of comments retrieved from a video of a famous amputee TikToker spreading awareness on disability. The results unveil and explain that people’s discriminatory practices and intolerant attitudes towards people with impairments are based on deep rooted mental models and beliefs that contribute to increasing the stigmatisation against them, thus paving the way to intersectional hateful discourses that create disability through the process of ‘othering’ by naming what is normal/ abnormal according to the dichotomy able bodiedness/disability. Accordingly, this paper aims to contribute to the emerging literature of studies on disability discourse with a specific perspective on DHS.