Good Words Hurt Too: The Cyberdiscourse Against Same-Sex Marriage in Taiwan

The anonymity and accessibility of the Internet has facilitated the way people promulgate ideas and beliefs and resulted in an unprecedented wave of biased and discriminatory speech in cyberspace. Its impact on policy issues and harm to disadvantaged groups has been widely explored since the end of the last century. This article analyzes cyberdiscourse attacking the same-sex marriage proposal in Taiwan in 2014 for its rhetorical strategies and imagined communal conceptions of marriage and homosexuals. The results show that although the anti-same-sex marriage discourse appeals to Chinese traditional values, it either appropriates the discursive strategies or translates the content and concepts from foreign hate group sites. This lack of local particularity illustrates the delocalizing effect of the Internet on today’s domestic anti-same-sex marriage campaigns and the ways they are heavily powered by transnational information flows via cyberspace.