How to “Kill” a Woman in and through Discourse: Character Assassination of Women Environmentalists

Recently, growing concerns about the exponential rise in hate speech, smear campaigns, and destructive personal attacks (referred to as «character assassination», as discussed by Berti and Loner ) against environmentalists, especially women , have come under the spotlight. Linguistic, pragmatic, sociological, and anthropological studies have identified the rhetoric devised by so-called «architects of disinformation» , i.e., propagandists engaged by nationalist populist movements and/or extreme right-wing factions («alt-right» ). These organized, and, in some cases, para-governmental groups aim to undermine the credibility and reputation of individuals advocating environmental causes, such as climate change mitigation, sustainable production processes, and biodiversity protection. This rhetoric heavily employs hate speech in environmentalist scenarios (e.g., by questioning Greta Thunberg’s reliability due to her Asperger’s syndrome) to lead the public into believing that the presumed unreliability of a cause’s supporter equates with the invalidity of the cause itself. In certain cases, delegitimization involves arguments that are completely unrelated with the reputation or with the reliability of the individual in question. For example, the Filipino environmentalist Renee Karunungan was discredited by labeling her as «ugly» and «fat» through digital attacks on social media, later linked to local para-governmental groups supporting intensive «agribusiness» and deforestation. These hate campaigns often escalate to the point of becoming threats of rape or death, intimidating the victims and, in some cases, managing to weaken or silence the environmentalist message. The use of hate speech thus serves to discredit not only the cause but also the spokesperson who advocated the cause in the first place. In extreme cases, these threats materialize into real murders, and, globally, an alarming number of environmentalists are physically eliminated, primarily in countries such as the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, Romania, and Honduras, once the process of isolating and eroding the environmentalist’s support base has been completed. In this chapter, we will present a case study of one woman activist to understand how delegitimating strategies are built in and through discourse. To this end, we will examine a set of replies to Sophia Kianni’s pinned Twitter post (top page position) in her profile page, namely a short clip displaying c. 1 minute of her speech delivered at the UN Fridays for Future event in November 2022. We build our analysis on a dataset collecting c. four hundred Twitter replies to Kianni’s pinned post. The analysis of this qualitative sample of manually collected replies is followed by the categorization of the different forms of hate speech. The analysis is provided with relevant examples to document several nuanced, yet repetitive, discourse strategies of a blatant rhetoric of misogynistic hatred, belittlement, abuse, as well as more indirect and subtle forms of allusive hate speech.