Investigating Cyberbullying through Forensic linguistics: Evidence from Iraqi Online Platform

This study investigates cyberbullying as a form of digital aggression through the framework of forensic lin-guistics, using evidence drawn from Iraqi online platforms. It addresses a gap in existing study, where cyberbullying has been studied mainly from psychological perspectives, while its linguistic construction and evidential value have received limited attention, particularly in Iraqi digital contexts. The study aims to examine how cyberbullying is constructed through lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic patterns, how cul-turally embedded expressions such as Iraqi dialects, religious language, and political identity discourse in-tensify online aggression, and how forensic linguistic techniques can identify recurrent harassment patterns and stylistic consistency. A mixed-method design was adopted, combining quantitative and qualitative analysis. A purposive sample of approximately 1,000 publicly available social media texts produced be-tween 2022 and 2024 was analyzed using frequency analysis, discourse analysis, lexical profiling, and sty-lometric comparison. The findings reveal that cyberbullying in Iraqi online discourse operates as a struc-tured linguistic phenomenon rather than spontaneous emotional conflict. Identity-based insults, dehumaniz-ing expressions, threats, and strategies of humiliation were found to function as systematic mechanisms of digital violence. The results also show that verbal abuse was the most frequent form of aggression, fol-lowed by threats and sarcasm-based humiliation. Culturally embedded expressions related to honor, sectar-ianism, religion, and political identity were found to intensify the emotional impact of cyberbullying. In addition, forensic linguistic analysis demonstrated that repetitive linguistic patterns can serve as indicators of sustained harassment and possible authorship continuity. The study concludes that cyberbullying in Iraq is not only a social problem but also a linguistic and forensic issue, with implications for cybercrime inves-tigation, digital safety policy, education, and legal accountability.

Cyberbullying, Forensic Linguistics, Iraqi Online Discourse, Digital Aggression

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