Social media and hate speech: The Argentinean extreme right and its construction of the enemy

M.L. PARDO

Swansea

Congreso; I conference on Radical Right Research International Network (RIN; 2020

Radical Right Research International Network (RIN) / University of Swansea

In recent years, the extreme right movements have grown steadily throughout the world. These movements exacerbate nationalisms (Hirst & Thompson, 1996). It is the expectable result of every globalizing process; they emerge as a kind of tension and contrast with the hegemony that is proposed by globalization. These ultranationalist movements have not been lacking in Latin America. In Argentina, the extreme right groups were at their height during the last military dictatorship (Vitale, 2009). They have shown some growth in the last years. The political party called Bandera Vecinal (Neighbourhood / Neighbours? Banner), leaded by Alejandro Biondini, a Nazi/anti-Semitic character, was acknowledged as such by Judge Lijo. Biondini?s discourse fits in what is now called ?new racism?, as it employs, among other resources, strategies of denial and simulation of prejudice, while at the same time that discourse is strategically organized to deny it (van Dijk, 1995; 1997; 1998; 2001; 2003a; 2003b; 2005; 2010a; 2010b; Augoustinos & Every, 2010). This rebirth of the radicalized right is termed the third neo-fascist way, between neoliberalism and communism (Bastow, 2010). The discourse of Bandera Vecinal is a clear example of what we call: hate speech.However, nowadays hate speech is not the sole propriety of these factions, nor of those connected with terrorism or cyberterrorism, as is the case in Europe or the United States; rather, it pervades politics. In the first place, I will explain what we understand by ?hate speech? (Kauffman, 2015:126), how it has become the focus of political discussion (Sierra González, 2007) and how its main point is the creation of an enemy. In the second place, I will analyse the discursive strategies that are present in Bandera Vecinal?s social media, primarily linked with the socio-discursive representations of the ?enemy?. Bandera Vecinal lives as an imaginary, ?sui generis? social community (Mouri & Lorenzo-Dus, 2019) that holds a hate speech aimed at different enemies, thus also generating a victim-victimizer relation which, as in a chain, continually redefines the positions of those who partake in hate speech.The corpus consists of Twitter and Facebook messages from the eleventh of May up to the eleventh of July, 2007, and the last months of 2018; they are part of the international project that we, together with Dr. Nuria Lorenzo-Dus and Viviane Resende (and their corresponding teams), are carrying out since last year. The corpus was primarily selected through the CQPweb software. The methodology is eminently qualitative and the theoretical framework is Critical Discourse Analysis.