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Top1. Introduction
Social media have become common sources of information, enjoyment, and social relations. For the last two decades, this has prompted a growing interest in studying the socio-behavioral change brought about by the online nature of human interaction, which includes aspects like verbal aggression, which has emerged as a substantial field of scholarly interest, with a specific focus on conflict on Twitter (Anderson & Cermele, 2014; Anderson & Huntington, 2017), YouTube (Bou-Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2014), blogs (Cicchirillo et al., 2015; Luzón, 2013); and more recently, WhatsApp (García-Gómez, 2018; Fernández-Amaya, 2019). Despite all the scholarly attention that Facebook has received since its origin (e.g., Carr et al., 2012; Ilyas and Khushi, 2012; KhosraviNik et al., 2014), verbal aggression on Facebook is still relatively under-researched compared to the widespread use of the platform across the globe (see Ging and O’Higgins, 2016; Malthus, 2019; Tagg et al., 2017). Another fact inherent to previous studies on verbal aggression in digital discourse is that there seems to be a tendency to focus on gender (Barak, 2005; Huffaker & Calvert, 2005; Anderson & Cermele, 2014; Bou-Franch, 2014; Sánchez-Moya, 2019).
Besides gender, another area that seems prone to online verbal aggression is politics (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010; Hmielowski et al., 2014; Cicchirillo et al., 2015; Hutchens et al. 2015; Masullo Chen & Lu, 2017). Moreover, as political communication is generally viewed at time as a context-specific appropriate discourse and face-attacking/face-aggravating interaction (Chilton, 2004), the (im)politeness-based explanation of aggression revolves around the interpretative dilemma surrounding the first-order politeness (or impoliteness 1) and second-order politeness (or impoliteness 2) understandings of (im)polite behaviour. While the first-order politeness makes reference to the various ways in which polite behaviour is perceived and talked about by members of socio-cultural groups, the second-order politeness, on the other hand, is a theoretical construct, a term within a theory of social behaviour and language usage (Watts et al. 2005; Culpeper 2011). Studies exploring verbal aggression from the first-order politeness explore aggression from addressee’s perception and assessment of what is and what is not aggressive conduct (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2012). However, studies approaching verbal aggression from the second-order politeness focus on face-based understanding aggression (Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2010). Goffman (1967, p. 5) defines face as “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is an image of self-delineated in terms of approved social attributes”. Face is, in other words, a two-edged concept made up of positive face – which represents “the want of every member that his wants be desirable to at least some others in particular, it includes the desire to be ratified, understood, approved of, liked or admired” – and negative face – which corresponds to “the want of every competent adult member that his actions be unimpeded by others” (Brown and Levinson, 1987, p. 62). The relevance of facework has, consequently, been of a paramount importance in the (im)politeness-based interpretation of verbal aggression in political discourse, since facework includes, among many other things, any actions that impinges to some degree upon a person's face, namely orders, insults, threats, criticisms and contradictions. These actions have been reported to be common practices in political settings (Groshek & Cutino, 2016).