Hate speech towards Syrian refugees on twitter

Hate speech is a serious problem which spoils culture of living together by sowing discord among communities, get reproduced via media and leads the way of hate crime. Due to social media features like interactivity, networked social media provides more appropriate environment for hate speech and its reproduction. Syrian refugees have been included to the communities already being on the hook which are exposured to hate speech. Hate speech directed to Syrian refugees also become prevalent by being reproduced on Twitter and pave the appropriate way for hate crime. Critical discourse analysis has been chosen to identify how and by which emphasises hate speech is formed. Accordingly, analysis of hate speech to Syrian refugees on Twitter was carried out within the frame of T. van Dijk's discourse analysis. To locate tweets about Syrian refugees, hashtags were reached via keywords like Syrian refugee, immigrant and #Suriyelileriistemiyoruz hashtag which had the same title with 'Suriyelileriistemiyoruz' protests was preferred. 1383 tweets between 1st of June 2014 and 31st of October 2018 in this hashtag were saved and then 976 tweets of July-August months from years 2014- 2018 were encoded with the program, Quirkos. After spotting 366 tweets which contain hate speech, selected six accounts and their tweets were analyzed by means of discourse analysis template adapted by Bayraktutan et al. (2013). Hate speech which stereotypes Syrian refugees and contains aspects like xenophobia and racism, was spotted in accounts and tweets which were sorted out as macro and micro structure. Another result of the research is ascertaining that Syrian refugees are seen as the "scapegoat" for the problems particularly economic and security issues. Keywords: Hate Speech, Twitter, Social Media, Syrian Refugee, Discourse Analysis.