Description
Digital Racism as New Generation of Threats to Human Security: The Case of Twitter
Sibel DİNÇ and Ayşegül BOSTAN*
Abstract
Supposed that it was perished in the globalised world, the concept of racism has been transformed into a type of new-generated-discrimination by new generation media tools recently. The new racism, namely digital racism, has been handled as a new generation of threat to human security in the UN Report 2022. The aim of this study is to obtain the adverbs of digital racist discourses, thereby such adverbs could facilitate to combat racism and give some hints to canalise the perception of the society into comprehensive inclusive sights. This paper handles inclusive and exclusive discourses towards the Syrian asylum seekers accommodated in Turkey on the digital platform, Twitter. The objective of the study is to analyse the political discourses on Syrian asylum seekers as one of the hot topics in Turkish politics. The interesting point is here the political party leaders tend to produce exclusive discourses against others to gain more votes from the population. As remembered that the Turkish presidential election will be held before July 2023, this period could be valuable to collect the data of this paper. The data, analysed by the method of content analysis, is comprised of the twits of the Turkish party leaders, Erdoğan-JDP, Kılıçdaroğlu-RPP, Bahçeli-NMP and Akşener-GP represented as group parties in the Turkish Grand National Assembly today, on the Syrian asylum seekers. The data that will be selected and analysed within the scope of the study was determined as the first part covering the last 3 months of 2022 and the second part covering the first 3 months of 2023 to examine the discourses between 2022 and 2023. The findings of this study are estimated that exclusive discourses will be based on political themes rather than economic and sociocultural themes such as citizenship, right to vote etc.
Keywords: Digital Racism, Twitter, Political Party, Syrian Asylum Seekers, Turkey.
*Research Assistant in Strategic Communication, Atatürk Strategic Studies and Graduate Institute, Turkish National Defence University, and PhD Student in Statistics Department of Yıldız Technical University, İstanbul, Turkey. Email: sdinc2@msu.edu.tr ORCID: 0000-0002-7456-8833.
**Dr. Assistant Professor in International Relations and Regional Studies, Atatürk Strategic Studies and Graduate Institute, Turkish National Defence University, İstanbul, Turkey. Email: abostan@msu.edu.tr ORCID: 0000-0002-8731-2757.
