The empirical material of this study consisted of tweets by four leading politicians in Sweden: Carl Bildt of Nya Moderaterna, Annie Lööf of Centerpartiet, Åsa Romson of Miljöpartiet and Jonas Sjöstedt of Vänsterpartiet. The aim of the study was to examine how they use Twitter as a political tool and what that says of the mediatization of politics. What content did they publish, how did the content differentiate between them and what political messages and other subjects occurred in their tweets? Does the political debate become fragmented because they’re only allowed to use 140 characters on Twitter? The theoretical framework and method applied for the research was based upon critical discourse analysis (CDA), with special interest in ideology and mediatized discourse. The result of the study showed that the content they published consisted mostly of criticism towards political opponents, rather than of independent political opinions. It also showed that the focus among the politicians was mostly on factual issues rather than on ideology. Furthermore, it showed that they use Twitter as a way of spreading information more than anything else. I argue that the political discourse that was present on Twitter among the politicians can be seen as somewhat populistic, due to the fact that they focused more on criticism towards political opponents than on independent political opinions and ideology. I argue that there are certain risks with their way of using Twitter as a political tool when political issues are brought out of their ideological context.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:umu-101358 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Forss, Alexander |
| Publisher | Umeå universitet, Institutionen för kultur- och medievetenskaper |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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