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"All the dislikes are PewDiePie's haters and enemies": The case of PewDiePie's YouTube community as a space for right-wing populist discourse

Thesis type
(Project) M.A.
Date created
2020-08-20
Authors/Contributors
Abstract
YouTube, a web platform with more than 2 billion individual monthly users, is a media powerhouse. However, despite various YouTube content creators garnering attention for their connection to rising global right-wing populism and hate groups— including viral creator PewDiePie, a Swedish gamer— the platform's ability for political discourse has been little studied. Thus, this paper, aided by theory on 'anti-publics', contemporary right-wing populism, and social identity, begins to unravel the complexities of political discourse in this particular online community. Through the analysis of sixty-thousand comments from six of PewDiePie's most popular videos, this project affirms that YouTube in this context does not prescribe to the majority of elements of a Habermasian public sphere as in the original definition. However, PewDiePie's community does present aspects of an anti-public sphere through the iteration of right-wing populist narratives and an emphasis on the creation of strong social identities.
Document
Identifier
etd21050
Copyright statement
Copyright is held by the author(s).
Permissions
This thesis may be printed or downloaded for non-commercial research and scholarly purposes.
Supervisor or Senior Supervisor
Thesis advisor: Pickup, Mark
Language
English
Member of collection
Download file Size
input_data\21017\etd21050.pdf 2.38 MB

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