Speech Act Analysis of ENGENE’s Hate Comments toward TREASURE on @pradawonki’s X Account

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the illocutionary speech acts  and type of hate speech  in the comments section of @pradawonki X's account, which has sparked a fan war between ENGENE and TEUME, leading to the trending hashtag #ENGENE_Criminal. The comments contained offensive, demeaning, and harassing intent by ENGENE toward the K-pop group TREASURE. This research is motivated by the increasing conflict between fandoms in the digital space, which often manifests in verbal aggression. This research employed Searle's (1979) theory of illocutionary speech acts to categorize the comments into five types: assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, and declarative. This study employs a qualitative descriptive approach. The results of this research indicate that assertive speech acts are the most dominant. These findings demonstrate how hate speech has become part of the symbolic practice, as hateful comments are often constructed to sound rational or reasoned, masking aggression behind seemingly neutral expressions of fandom dynamics.