Political dogwhistles and community divergence in semantic change (2023)

Abstract: We test whether the development of political dogwhistles can be observed using language change measures; specifically, does the development of a “hidden” message in a dogwhistle show up as differences in semantic change between communities over time? We take Swedish-language dogwhistles related to the on-going immigration debate and measure differences over time in their rate of semantic change between two Swedish-language community forums, Flashback and Familjeliv, the former representing an in-group for understanding the “hidden” meaning of the dogwhistles. We find that multiple measures are sensitive enough to detect differences over time, in that the meaning changes in Flashback over the relevant time period but not in Familjeliv. We also examine the sensitivity of multiple modeling approaches to semantic change in the matter of community divergence.

## introduction as a type of manipulative communication, a political dogwhistle is a message with a controversial (or extreme) in-group meaning that is hidden to most of the public and only apprehended by a limited proportion of its audience, but at the same time communicates a less controversial (less extreme) out-group meaning to the wider audience who does not grasp the in-group meaning of the message @xcite . an example is "inner city", which has a general meaning of "central section of a city" but has also been used with concealed derogatory racial reference to an area with a poor, african american population @xcite . dogwhistles enable attracting some part of its audience who are appealed to by the extreme view, while at the same time not offending others (who do not get the hidden message). with concealed meanings, communicators can avoid accountability for expressing and approving of controversial views. therefore dogwhistle communication can pose problems for representative democracy @xcite and speech moderation online @xcite @xcite ). 1 by design, in-group meanings of dogwhistles evolve in parallel to existing out-group interpretations. therefore semantic change is essential to the concept of the dogwhistle. however, little systematic attention has, in fact, been devoted to semantic change in dogwhistle expressions. this paper sets out to study this under-explored temporal dimension of dogwhistles through techniques from natural language processing (nlp) to detect lexical semantic change (lsc). more precisely, the aim of this paper is to explore the role of community in the semantic change of set of known-to-be swedish dogwhistle expressions (dwes), identified in other work @xcite @xcite , including kulturberika (culture enrich) and globalist (described in more detail below). in this work, we address the role of community in semantic change by studying the semantic change of dwes in two online communities @xcite : flashback, which is a discussion forum that is known for hosting controversial topics of discussion and for expression of controversial societal opinions @xcite @xcite ; and familjeliv ("family life" in english), which is a discussion forum that is expected to be very different from flashback, with its focus on topics of parenting and family life, but also include discussions on politics and society @xcite . we test the isolated change of dwes hypothesis, i.e., that meaning change of dog-whistles is community-dependent. here, this expectation is more precisely tested under the following formulation: h1: the degree of semantic change of (selected) dwes observed in the (highly politically polarized) online community flashback is different from the degree of semantic change of the same terms (at the same period of time) in the (less polarized) community familjeliv. in recent years, several different approaches have been developed for modeling of lsc @xcite @xcite . for a robust testing of h1, we test and compare results modeled by three different approaches: (1) the sgns approach, which uses word embeddings built through a skip-gram with negative sampling (sgns) model @xcite ; (2) the sbert-prt approach which averages over contextual token embeddings from sentence-bert (sbert) @xcite , so called "prototypes" (prt) @xcite ; and (3) the sbert-clt approach which, like the previous approach, uses contextual embeddings from sbert, but instead of averaging, clusters token embeddings and compare distribution over clusters over time. we test h1 with respect to all three approaches (described in more detail below). ## results for an approach a and a corpus ω, let s a,ω be the series of measures of change at each wordtransition combination, ∆ 1 , . . . ∆ n , where n is the total number of combinations such that the frequency of w at t i and t i+1 is at least 10 (minimum frequency). h1 has multiple variants depending on which approach that is considered. moreover, for the sgns and sbert-prt approaches, variants are defined for both naive and rectified change. for sbert-clt, only the jsd measure of semantic change is tested. these combinations result in five variants of h1 being tested, one for each of: (1) sgns with naive change, (2) sgns with rectified change, (3) sbert-prt with naive change, (4) sbert-prt with rectified change, and (5) sbert-clt with jsd change. to clarify, for each hypothesis, two series of change measures are defined by the same approach and the same change metric, but for data from different communities, i.e. flashback and familjeliv. note that for every version of h1 there is a corresponding null hypothesis h0, that the two samples are equal. statistically, all variants of h1 are tested through the two-sample kolmogorov-smirnov test (kstest), see appendix c. the test-statistic d ks of a ks-test provides a measure of the likelihood that two samples derive from the same distribution. like other statistical testing, if d ks reaches the critical value at the decided alpha-level (α = 0.05), h0 is considered unlikely and is rejected, in support of h1. the ks-tests are only based on transitions which fulfill the minimum frequency criterion in both samples (@xmath0. all versions of h1 are supported ( ## discussion this study finds support for the isolated change of dwes hypothesis. there is a detectable difference in the rate of semantic change of dwes between the more politically polarized community and the less polarized community. it could have been possible that dwes change to the same degree in the community more representative of the in-group and the community more representative of the out-group, even if they meant different things to the community participants. in that case, our measures would not have detected a difference. but there is a difference in degree likely driven by the communicative needs of the in-group community. as such, this paper corroborates previous work that has emphasized the role of community in accounting for dogwhistle meanings @xcite , but this finding must also be seen in the light of a previous emphasis on the importance of community for word meaning in general @xcite . following @xcite 's notion of convention, @xcite writes "conventional meaning hold not for a word simpliciter, but for a word in a particular community. you can't talk about conventional word meaning without saying what community it is conventional in" (p. 107, emphasis in original). @xcite continues by defining a "communal lexicon" as the set of word conventions of an individual community and notes that such communal lexicons sometimes contain unique word forms (e.g., quark in the community of modern physicists), but more often the same word form is shared among different although @xcite does not discuss his notion of communal lexicon in relation to semantic change, @xcite have expanded on clark's ideas and did observe that meanings of terms evolve relative to the communities they are used in @xcite . our result is quantitative evidence in the swedish online context of different communal lexicons evolving in parallel in relation to a political drive regarding messaging on a controversial topic, immigration and refugees. dogwhistle meaning can thus be understood partially in relation to some general principles of lexical meaning. however, whether dwes' dependence on community for semantic change is especially strong in comparison with words not laden with the role of dwe is an interesting question for future research. another point should be noted with regard the isolated change of dwes hypothesis. its support has implications for the task of automated detection of dogwhistles, which is important to counteract hidden racist language online, by potential disclosure of concealed derogatory messages. the lesson here, from our experimental support for the isolated change of dwes hypothesis, is that terms that change in one community, but not in another, are possible indicators of emerging dogwhistles. although such community specific change of meaning is not a sufficient criterion for the identification of dogwhistles, it can be part of a solution to a complex problem of detecting dogwhistles and other concealed code words, which is gaining increasing attention in nlp @xcite @xcite @xcite . there are a number of avenues for future work on this topic. one of these would be to address how the assumed dwes change. this can include a more detailed qualitative analysis of the linguistic contexts of the dogwhistles in the years that they exhibit greater change difference between the two communities. future studies can systematically address the extent that semantic change of these terms is related to their potential dogwhistle functions. for example, do changes reflect encoding of in-group meanings or do they rather reflect other forms of semantic drift, for example, with regard to various topics? another avenue for future work would be an analysis of the differences between the change measurement approaches, since they are often poorly correlated with one another. a further, more ambitious agenda, would be to identify characteristics of dwe-related lexical semantic change that differ from non-dwe community-based semantic change, which would enable their detection and differentiation in large corpora. part of this agenda, could be a systematic comparison dwes and other words with regard to their community divergence of semantic change in order to determine the extent that community divergence is a feature of special importance for words functioning as dwes compared with words in general.