Light and Shadow in Hate-Speech Cases: A Forensic Linguistics

Digital democracy has produced a wave of political activism led by a number of Key Opinion Leaders (KOL). However, this activity began to face a serious challenges following the issuance of the Information and Electronic Transaction Law (ITE) which is considered a silencing weapon for freedom of expression in cyberspace. Therefore, this study aims to reconsider several cases of hate speech that convicted three KOL people who were selected through the Forensic Linguistics approach. The data is sourced from utterances published on their respective social media accounts. Semiotic analysis and pragmatic discourse methods are integrated into the data interpretation and description process. The results of the analysis concluded that the posts from three convicted KOL (ADP, JG, BY) have fulfilled the element of hate speech acts through illocutionary speech acts that contain elements of humiliation, defamation, and incitement of violence and provocation that have the potential to create conflicts between religions, ethnicities and groups.