THE KEYBOARD WARRIORS: EXPRESSING HATRED AND JUDGEMENT ON “ANOTHER” WOMAN THROUGH HATERS’ INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT

Abstract

Nowadays, many celebrities use Instagram to connect with their fans. Unfortunately, for some celebrities, their popularity may not necessarily mean that they are liked by the public. The keyboard warriors, i.e. haters can freely hit the keyboard and leave hate comments as cyber communication does not require face-to-face interactions. Some of them even go so far by creating haters’ accounts of certain public figures, as can be found on @mulanjameelaqueen, created by the haters of Mulan Jameela, an Indonesian singer known for her affairs and unregistered marriage with her friend’s husband. This paper explores how being “another” woman is perceived in Indonesia. Mateo and Yus’ (2013) pragmatic taxonomy of insults was used as the framework of analysis. The data were taken from the captions and the comments of 10 of the most commented posts of @mulanjameelaqueen. They were processed by using AntConc to obtain the most frequently used words and their collocations, and the word clusters. The results show that the most commonly used lexicons to refer to Mulan are: cireng ‘traditional snack’, lonte ‘whore’, Jamilonte or Mulonte (coined from Mulan Jameela and lonte ‘prostitute’), and iblis ‘devil’. The malicious comments are mostly related to Mulan’s physical appearance, death threat to Mulan, divorce, and nikah siri ‘unregistered marriage’. The comments may also reflect most of the haters’ (mostly females) negative perception and judgement on unregistered marriage, divorced female, and “another” woman.