“Freedom of speech requires actions”: Exploring the discourse of politicians convicted of hate‐speech against Muslims

This study explores how politicians convicted of hate‐speech against Muslims account for their actions in statements on their Facebook‐pages as well as in reported interviews. Taking a critical discursive psychological perspective, the study examines the strategies through which the politicians disc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEuropean journal of social psychology Vol. 49; no. 5; pp. 938 - 952
Main Author Pettersson, Katarina
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Bognor Regis Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.08.2019
Subjects
Communication
critical discursive psychology
Discourse
Freedom of speech
Freedoms
Hate
hate‐speech
Morality
Muslims
Persuasion
Political communication
political discourse
Politicians
Psychological research
Social identity
Social Identity theory
Strategies
subject positions
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Summary:This study explores how politicians convicted of hate‐speech against Muslims account for their actions in statements on their Facebook‐pages as well as in reported interviews. Taking a critical discursive psychological perspective, the study examines the strategies through which the politicians discursively claim and resist various subject positions, thus managing to construct their hate‐speech as everything from trivial mishaps to acts of virtue. The study examines the multifaceted dynamics of these constructions, and shows how elements from the Five Step Social Identity Model of the Development of Collective Hate are flexibly deployed in the discourse to serve distinct social and political purposes. By allowing the Social Identity and (critical) discursive approaches to challenge and develop each other, the study advances social psychological research on political communication and persuasion, and contributes to the debate on the boundaries between hate‐speech and freedom of speech.
Bibliography:Facebook owns the right to the contents produced by its users; thus, the material used in this study cannot be publicly stored. Due to copyright regulations, the news media material used in this study cannot be handed to third parties. However, it will be stored in the Finnish Social Science Data Archive and become publicly accessible after the research is completed.
Accordingly, as both the Facebook‐pages and the news media articles constitute readily accessible and public material, and as the concerned politicians do not belong to any threatened minority that I might harm with my research, I could use this material without the politicians’ consent.
Conflict of Interest Statement
The author declares that there are no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical Statement
Transparency Statement
In terms of the ethical considerations related to using these sets of material, I abided by the guidelines of the Association of Internet Researchers
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ISSN:0046-2772
1099-0992
DOI:10.1002/ejsp.2577