Analyzing the far-right political action on Twitter: the Chilean constituent process

Abstract

The concept of “politics of the end” assumes the catastrophe of living in a world that produces new forms of accumulation and allows symbolic and semiotic capital to create value. Currently, various far-right movements worldwide seem to appropriate this concept, employing radical communication strategies as a repertoire to contest the public agenda. These strategies include the massive creation of bots on social networks to spread hate speech and coordinate ideological manifestations. This article seeks to verify the use of these strategies by the Chilean far-right on Twitter. For the above, a social network analysis approach is proposed during the current socio-political crisis in Chile, which began with the massive protests of October 2019 and led to an unprecedented constituent process. For nine months, we studied five opinion leaders on Twitter from the Chilean far-right, who together have more than 600 thousand followers and almost 130 thousand followings. Through descriptive, quantitative, and qualitative techniques, an explicit political action “from the resistance” is revealed in the activity of the network, which includes hundreds of new users and coordinated bots to disseminate identifiable discourses with strongly ideological ideas. This coordination also presents identifiable differences in how opinion leaders interact and communicate with their network environment.

The affordances of extreme speech

“…But one recurrent observation is that, instead of disappearing from the face of the Web, moderated language tends to be redistributed beyond or across social media platforms with different “speech affordances.” Different platforms have different margins of tolerance for objectionable speech—some larger, some thinner, some looser—based on different philosophies of free speech, as well as different estimations of what constitutes objectionable language (de Keulenaar et al, 2023). One of the immediate implications of these “speech affordances” is that what one platform sanctions may eventually migrate to more permissive platforms with less traffic or engagement (Rogers, 2020), reconstituting itself across a wider, more-to-less permissive (or fringe-to-mainstream) social media geography. This complicates the historical project of speech moderation, which fundamentally should not resort to punishing “extreme” speech alone, but consolidate consensus and constructive dialogue in a common public sphere.…”