Social Media and Political Communication

The thrust of this study is to discern how Twitter is changing the patterns of political communication and political expression. In particular, this paper aims to examine the ways Twitter enables the generation of hate speech and intolerance discourses. It is an attempt to obtain a first perception of the hate speech phenomenon within the Greek Twittersphere and to demonstrate what forms of hate speech are being produced, as well as what are the attributes of hate speech messages. Undoubtedly, hate speech on a popular social media platform like Twitter, could possibly obstruct the constructive process of deliberation and also threaten democracy. The research of this paper was based on the case of the murder of a leftist rapper Pavlos Fyssas by a member of Golden Dawn, a right-wing political party in Greece and the tweets that were produced 24 hours after this incident. 2052 tweets related to the event were collected, analyzed and classified into categories based on communication form, content, hate speech characteristics, hate speech targets and hate speech producer’s attributes.