Cyberbullying in Poland: a case study of aggressive messages with emojis targeted at the community of hunters in urbanized society

The aim of the paper is to present the phenomenon of cyberbullying in Poland via emojis. Linguistic aggression is nowadays present in many spheres of human life and social media seem to be the main channel of cyberbullying outburst. One of the methods of expressing aggression is using emojis. Emojis have been developed to communicate emotions initially in a creative way. Unfortunately, the images have soon started to be used for cyberbullying. The research material consists of blogs and Facebook sites devoted to hunting. Hunting in urbanized societies is mainly understood as the unnecessary killing of innocent animals and many people having limited environmental knowledge perceive it stereotypically. The Polish Hunting Association members have been involved in protecting and restoring to their natural environments such species endangered with extinction as European bisons, beavers, moose, and Western capercaillie. However, people brought up far from nature in the idealized urban world very frequently resort to cyberbullying to stigmatize the community of hunters considered to be a community of ruthless and bloodthirsty killers only. The authors of the paper focus on the role of hunting and the language of aggression and emoticons used to express aggression and hatred against hunters for any reason.