Stirring Up the Hornet's Nest. Radicalization Strategies of the Spanish Far-Right Twitter Followers

Abstract

In the last decade, the Spanish political landscape has undergone a rapid transformation, moving from the bipartisan alternation between PP (the People’s Party) and PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) to the emergence of new political parties with populist approaches, such as Podemos and the radical right-wing Vox, which uses Twitter as one of its main channels of interaction with their supporters. It seems crucial then to investigate the strategies of viralization of radical messages through the microblogging network and monitor the route from official tweets to those disseminated by highly influential far-right profiles not officially linked to Vox (e.g., @TeamFacha, @Españabola, or @Eugenio D’Ors), who are capable of multiplying the impact of these messages in a much more aggressive and extremist register. For such a purpose, relying on the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) methodology, we will study the conceptual frameworks deployed in these profiles and their echo in those of private users, to probe the populist features of Vox’s discourse in the changing and turbulent digital world.