From Criticism to Digital Aggression: Indonesian Facebook Reactions to the National Data Center Breach

Abstract

This study examines how digital aggression was linguistically constructed in Indonesian Facebook reactions to the National Data Center (Pusat Data Nasional, PDN) breach and whether such hostility crossed the threshold of hate-oriented expression. Drawing on forensic linguistics, sociolinguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis, the study applies corpus-assisted qualitative discourse analysis to 404 unique timestamped publicly accessible Facebook comments posted between 29 June and 2 July 2024. The analysis focuses on lexical choice, target construction, blame attribution, illocutionary force, and ideological framing. Rather than treating all hostile expressions as hate speech, the study distinguishes policy criticism, hostile evaluation, personal insult, digital aggression, and hate-oriented expression. The findings show that 193 comments, or 47.8% of the corpus, contained at least one form of digital aggression, yielding 233 coded category instances under multi-label coding. Blame attribution was the dominant category, followed by delegitimation of authority, personal insult, hostile evaluation, and sarcastic ridicule. No comment met the study's strict operational definition of hate-oriented expression. The study argues that hostility in the corpus is better understood as accountability-driven digital aggression rather than hate speech, with implications for forensic linguistics, critical digital literacy, and online discourse education.