Hate speech and environmental activist discourse: Critical analysis of user comments to one controversial tweet by Just Stop Oil

On 14 October 2022, two activists from the environmental group Just Stop Oil threw a can of tomato soup at Van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, gluing themselves to the wall beneath the painting. The action, covered in a tweet by the organisation, received a backlash of negative comments by social media users. The present paper focuses on hate speech in response to the controversial tweet by Just Stop Oil in a dataset of about 2700 user comments. Moving from critical discourse studies of hate speech in digital contexts, the manual and software-assisted qualitative analysis employs the appraisal framework and discourse-historical strategies to observe the discursive construction of hate themes against environmental activism. In line with ecolinguistics, findings suggest that, when something valued as extremely positive and important such as art is under attack, people may fail to recognise the motivations behind activist action, appraising it negatively through hate speech, and even distancing themselves from environmental values.