Discursive framing of the Political Party Podemos’s trolls in social networks

Abstract

Through a virtual ethnography in social networks, we examined the discursive frameworks that regulate the interactions of internet users surrounding the political party “Podemos”. We interviewed and observed internet users who reacted to televised political debates where members of the Podemos party participated. Our research primarily analyzes the incursion of trolls disrupting the dynamics of the forums and the reactions of its participants. In the arc of this cross-platform (television and digital media) narrative, we identify the different mass media processes, understood as instants of permeability, in the speech of individuals. The research asks if the non-hierarchical nature of new media allowed spaces of freedom. The analysis of the results draws a bleak picture, where instead of facilitating debates in which rational understandings are reached, the digital modes of sociability polarize the discursive inertia. It concludes with a reflection on the need to subvert these inertias through education to the unpredictable and to discursive plurality.