Framing hate with hate frames: Designing the codebook

Hate groups increasingly use social media to promote extremist ideologies. They frame their online communications to appeal to potential recruits. Informed by sociological theories of framing, we develop the “Hate Frames Codebook”, a hand-coding scheme for analyzing online hate. The “Hate Frames Codebook” offers a two-fold outlook on hateful communications. First, it adopts a Collective Action perspective to analyze how hate groups identify problems in the social groups they target, suggest solutions to the problems, and motivate their supporters. Then, the codebook highlights strategies of influence through the lens of Propaganda Devices. We validate our codebook by applying it to a sample of 250 publicly available tweets sent by 15 Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate groups. The codebook fosters future research by outlining the dimensions of framing in hate group communications, thus laying theoretical grounds for curating datasets and building computational models of hateful language.