  While social media empowers freedom of expression and individual voices, it
also enables anti-social behavior, online harassment, cyberbullying, and hate
speech. In this paper, we deepen our understanding of online hate speech by
focusing on a largely neglected but crucial aspect of hate speech -- its
target: either "directed" towards a specific person or entity, or "generalized"
towards a group of people sharing a common protected characteristic. We perform
the first linguistic and psycholinguistic analysis of these two forms of hate
speech and reveal the presence of interesting markers that distinguish these
types of hate speech. Our analysis reveals that Directed hate speech, in
addition to being more personal and directed, is more informal, angrier, and
often explicitly attacks the target (via name calling) with fewer analytic
words and more words suggesting authority and influence. Generalized hate
speech, on the other hand, is dominated by religious hate, is characterized by
the use of lethal words such as murder, exterminate, and kill; and quantity
words such as million and many. Altogether, our work provides a data-driven
analysis of the nuances of online-hate speech that enables not only a deepened
understanding of hate speech and its social implications but also its
detection.
