Religious hate speech in new media: A case study on Twitter

With the advancement of technology and modern and postmodern processes, the boundaries of our conception of space and time have become flexible, and religious discourses have started to produce new meanings in digital environments. The feeling of hatred, which creates a common emotion and enables a common reaction, leads us to produce discourse against others with the irresponsibility of digitality. The main areas of interest of this study are the legitimization of digital hate speech on the basis of intolerance and intolerance with religious content, the digital expression of traditional religious discourses, the sloganization of religious discourses in new media environments, the digital reflections of the takfir tradition, the legitimization of hate speech in the religious sphere, digital religious authoritarianism, and the grounds for hate speech in all these issues. The aim of our study is to determine what role religious beliefs and values play in the production of hate speech by users on Twitter, one of the new media environments. Examples of hate speech with religious content produced on Twitter, which was determined as the sampling area of the study, were selected from the hate speech generated by users who belong to the same religion but have differences in interpretation. While the theoretical framework of the study is based on the concepts of new media and hate speech, the practical part of the study is based on the data obtained from the concepts scanned from the search engine of the Twitter platform. From this point of view, the change in the language of religious discourse on Twitter, the topics where hate speech is concentrated and the relationship between religious discourse and hate were evaluated with the critical discourse analysis method. The examples were analyzed at the macro level in terms of narrative language, background and contextual information, and at the micro level in terms of sentence structure, grammar and the way language is used. In the study, the structure of Twitter, which is based on interaction and viewing, makes religious hate speech slagonic and headline-grabbing, the takfir tradition plays a role in hate production by reinforcing the phenomenon of othering and targeting in the digital environment, and traditional religious discourses sharpen in the digital environment and provide a legitimate ground for religious hatred, It has been observed that fanatical religious discourses imposed in the name of religion cause polarization in the digital environment, that those who speak in the name of religion and God turn hatred into a propaganda tool in the process of building their digital religious authority, and that issues such as religious knowledge, privacy, notification, tolerance, religious authority, which constitute the content of religious discourses on Twitter, are represented differently from their traditional codes. Key Words: New Media, Hate Speech, Sociology of Religion, Digitilazition, Twitter.