Accounting for Offensive Speech as a Practice of Resistance (2022)

Abstract: Tasks such as toxicity detection, hate speech detection, and online harassment detection have been developed for identifying interactions involving offensive speech. In this work we articulate the need for a relational understanding of offensiveness to help distinguish denotative offensive speech from offensive speech serving as a mechanism through which marginalized communities resist oppressive social norms. Using examples from the queer community, we argue that evaluations of offensive speech must focus on the impacts of language use. We call this the cynic perspective– or a characteristic of language with roots in Cynic philosophy that pertains to employing offensive speech as a practice of resistance. We also explore the degree to which NLP systems may encounter limits to modeling relational context.

## introduction tasks such as the detection of toxicity, hate speech, and online harassment have been developed to identify and intervene in situations that have the potential to cause significant social harm. these tasks for identifying and classifying offensive or undesirable language have gone by different names (see: @xcite ) and have employed varying task definitions, but they are united by a goal of reducing harm and breakdowns in civil discourse. because language use varies contextually, it is difficult to model the nuanced social context that informs whether language produces harm. offensive language classification and related tasks capture different forms of undesirable language, such as language that is rude, incites hate, causes offense, or causes people to disengage from online interaction. in this paper, we discuss a form of offensive language that has not previously received much research attention in the machine learning (ml) * authors contributed equally community, namely offensive language that is beneficial in its use and whose prosocial effects are sociologically and historically documented. in other words, language that uses terminology which is often noted as offensive, but which is not perceived as offensive in particular contexts of use. we distinguish this language with contextuallyspecific beneficial impacts as reappropriated. understanding how to characterize and model this kind of language is important not only because of its widespread use, but also because of the critical sociological role it can play, particularly within marginalized communities. we contribute: 1) a framing of offensiveness that accounts for socially productive uses of denotatively offensive language; 2) a general understanding of offensive language that builds from definitions of hate speech and toxicity to show the difficulty of operationalizing relational context; 3) specific challenges and directions for improving how we operationalize relational aspects of offensiveness. we also call on researchers developing offensive speech classification tasks to engage with offensiveness as a social relation that arises not just between individuals in communication but also between communities of discourse. in other words, offensiveness and its impacts are best understood from the perspectives of those already embedded in relationships that structure who produces, receives, perceives and who is targeted (i.e., who is implicitly or explicitly named) by offensive speech. we separately name reception and perception to distinguish between the recipient(s) of a message, such as an alias tagged in a tweet, and those who may not be the intended audience but to whom the content is visible. however, practical challenges in data collection and annotation task design can cause offensiveness to be implicitly operationalized as a semantic property of language. our discussion begins with the foundations of offensiveness, adding to challenges that have been highlighted by others. we also provide considerations and steps forward for improving automated offensiveness classification. we argue that accounting for the social and historical constitution of offensive language is important for the responsible development of automated and semi-automated tools to identify offensive language. to do so, in turn, deepens our understanding of offensive speech and recognizes the disparate impacts or ends of offensive language (e.g., as a means to silence others; as a means to challenge existing social structures). ## a working definition of offensiveness natural language processing (nlp) systems have historically faced challenges identifying and classifying denotatively offensive language used with inoffensive connotation @xcite @xcite . a challenge inherent to defining different forms of hateful, toxic, or offensive language is that the characterization of these terms is necessarily socially, culturally, and politically specific. for this reason, @xcite identify the robust inclusion of social context in understanding language as a key missing component for the success of modeling approaches. building from definitions of hate speech and toxicity, we establish a working definition of offensiveness that can better account for missing social context. hate speech is typically defined to link the use of derogatory language to a person or people based on group membership, such as "some characteristic such as race, color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or other characteristics" @xcite . one of the key characteristics of this definition is that it focuses on the injury applied to a specific subject of offense. broadly, definitions of hate speech underscore a need to identify who the target is in order to assess offense or harm. we argue that the target of offensive language is best understood with respect to differential relations and power dynamics between them and the producers, receivers, and perceivers of offensive speech. in contrast to hate speech and other definitions of offensive language, toxicity is specifically oriented around the measurable outcome of language use. defined as, "a rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable comment that is likely to make people leave a discussion," foot_0 it does not engage explicitly with injury or harm, but links it to measurable behavior. toxicity helps bring attention to the ends of reappropriated offensive language, and what characteristics can help distinguish it from denotative uses of offensive language. on its own, however, it is not clear that it suffices to protect the user's best interest, as it does not engage explicitly with the subject of verbal injury. the definition serves those with an interest to maximize user engagement, i.e. to minimize the chances of the user "leaving a discussion". it is conceivable that users who experience offense may not leave a discussion, for example in cases where users are habitually exposed to the relevant offense, such as microaggressions. hate speech and toxicity help us to construct a relational view for grounding a more robust definition of offensiveness-that is, a view that considers the social relations among targets of offensive language, and the producers, receivers, and perceivers (each of whom can also be a target) of denotatively offensive speech. this view is focused on identifying the network of social relations rather than some essential attribute of words or phrases. ## drag queens and the cynic perspective in this section, we analyze language use within the queer community to show how social relations and the ends of targeted language can help us to understand how denotatively offensive language 1) can have expressly beneficial ends and 2) can work as a social practice of collective resistance which fulfills a function of "self-innoculation" against out-group antagonism. we specifically analyze mock impoliteness used by drag queens that implicitly offers a critique of exclusionary sexual mores and social attitudes that hinder the self-expression of queer communities. these social attitudes include the demonization of queer sexuality, gender expression and visibility. we foreground our example with the case of cynic offensive speech, which we present as a historical practice of resistance to unreflective social conventions. we show that denotatively offensive language as vehiculated by drag queens is not an isolated sociological phenomenon but instead should be inscribed in a history of practices of resistance. culpeper (2011) defines mock impoliteness as language which "consists of impolite forms whose effects are (at least theoretically for the most part) canceled by the context." the author continues "[...] mock impoliteness in theoretical terms [is understood] as involving the canceling of impoliteness' perlocutionary effects flowing from a conventionalised impoliteness formula when an obvious mismatch emerges with the context it is used in." one key aspect that we want to emphasize here is how mock impoliteness works to both reduce the harmful effects of targeted insult while supporting social bonding and relationship building. ## rethinking offensiveness for machine learning practice in our assessment of mock impoliteness, we motivate a relational frame with an example of marginal discourse to bring attention to social relations reflective of power dynamics in society. however this does not emerge from a void. rather, it is grounded in a broad range of conceptual precedents that articulate the social, ethical and epistemological role of relationality. for example, foucault's analyzes power (pouvoir) as a techno-social relation of subjection @xcite and of freedom @xcite , arendt theorizes power as a capacity to act in concert with others @xcite , weber understands power (macht) as the exercise of a will on another will @xcite , and patricia hill collins' analysis of lived experience within the domain of black feminist epistemologies are key to our argument @xcite . in particular, hill collins analyzes the "connections between knowledge and power relations" and the particular forms of knowledge operative in black women's lived experience. in all of these cases, relationality unveils and constitutes new forms of knowledge, new forms of ethical action, and new forms of individual and collective experience. more specifically, in the space of ai ethics, birhane (2021) discusses relational ethics as a "framework" that re-examines "hierarchical power asymmetries," how the "contingent and interconnected background that algorithmic systems emerge from (and are deployed to) in the process of protecting the welfare of the most vulnerable." cooper et al. (2022) put forward a framework for relational accountability, @xcite proposes a relational theory of data governance which shows how "data relations result in supraindividual legal interests" that in turn "materialize unjust social relations" via data flows which order in particular ways social existence. at the conceptual level a relational frame shows that particular social and historical context is crucial to account for how offensive speech emerges and is constituted in a network of social relations by introducing discursive markers of style (as our example of mock impoliteness in drag queen shows) rather than relying on the perceived essential attribute of words or phrases. it also lays the foundation for practical experimentation and highlights avenues for designing classification tasks and identifying what context must be accounted for in data annotation, dataset construction, and modeling techniques. ## conclusion contrary to common understandings of offensive language as negative and harmful, we show that offensive speech can function as a practice of resistance to unjust social norms and, in specific cases, can serve a socially beneficial role. in doing so we highlight three necessary criteria for evaluating offensive language, 1) the subject of an offensive utterance and their social position, 2) the outcomes of offensive language, and 3) the sociological role that offensiveness and offense serves. queer mock impoliteness specifically illustrates that, although sarcasm, humor, and irony pose significant challenges to existing classification tasks, there is an ethical and social need to account for subversive uses of denotatively offensive language. this type of reappropriated speech serves to solidify a collective identity, protect ingroup members from outgroup abuse, and resist exclusionary and restrictive social norms. the practice finds its historical emergence in a different yet related practice of training for adversity put forward by the cynics in which offensive discourse works as a way to challenge unreflective societal norms. although operationalizing a relational definition of offensiveness comes with challenges, such as practical and ethical limits to observing social identity and user behavior, we point to promising research directions to better account for the expressly beneficial sociological role that offensiveness can play in social discourse.