Hate speech regarding the discussions on social media and public sphere: An analysis on Twitter (Case of Syrians)

Digital technology and communication networks are changing numerous things in the era that we live in radically. This change affects all of our relationships with especially other people, government agencies, political institutions and media, and it even affects the processes of reaching information, reading and understanding. The transformation of all these complex social fictions in this new order where all kinds of distance is redefined also directly transforms politics. It is almost impossible for this increase in the potential of interpersonal communications not to affect the policies in terms of the interaction of more people with each other in less time. There is a new situation regarding people who meet on digital communication networks that these channels now have a public quality. Therefore, the question that whether digital media called new media or social media will be the new public sphere in today's world is the main discussion in this thesis. Hannah Arendt's approach to the public sphere and politics phenomena also constitutes the theoretical framework of the thesis while discussing the public nature of digital media. On the other hand, we selected the hate speech phenomenon which we often encountered in political arguments on social media as a reference point to discuss publicity. The aim of the study was to discuss the potential of these channels to become the new public sphere in today's world by using the discourse analysis method on hate speech generated over Syrians on Twitter.