Online Hate Speech in Response to Music Videos?

This book analyzed the kind of feedback given to music videos of female and male artists on YouTube. Five types of feedback were distinguishing in the comments; Compliment, Neutral, Critical, Hostile and Excluded. The theoretical basis of this investigation is the group-focused enmity syndrome and it focused on the hostile feedback given and additionally observed if the sexualization contained in music videos causes any differences in the amount of published hateful comments. The aim is to reveal if there are differences regarding artist gender and their musical genres Pop and Latin pop. A quantitative content analysis examined the most liked comments of 20 music videos (N = 3600). This book reveals that there is only a low level of hostile feedback in music videos (1%), most comments were compliments. With respect of gender differences, women received significantly more supportive feedback, especially about their appearance and more critical feedback overall. Regarding hostile responses, female artists got more sexual aggressive and sexist comments. Moreover, music videos containing high sexualization (Latin pop) had more sexually aggressive comments.