The Politicisation of historical memory on Twitter. “Positive antisemitism” in the Holocaust debate in Poland, Rethinking History
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Date
2023-09
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Abstract
Political struggles on historical memory have adapted to the digital specificity of Twitter and are currently growing in significance. This study investigates the sentiment bias of a memory war between two major Polish political parties, the currently ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) and Civic Platform (PO), themain opposition party, concerning Polish-Jewish relations, and especially the Holocaust. 23699 PO tweets and 29441 PiS tweets from 2015-2019 were collected, out of which 241 concerning memory war were sampled with Lexicon-Based Approach. Sentiment was analyzed using tweet-wise consensual coding in ordinal 5-points scale and automated word-wise coding in 3-points scale. PiS tweets had more positive sentiment regarding the memory of the Holocaust and Jewish legacy in Poland. The final hermeneutical analysis showed that the rulling party narratives were aimed appropriation of collective memory and “Polonizing” the Holocaust, and that the positive sentiment was a function of ‘positive anti-Semitism’.
Description
Analiza dyskursu na temat Holocaustu generowanego przez główne siły polityczne w Polsce (Platforma Obywatelska i PiS) w procesie komunikacji z wyborcami/społęczeństwem za pomocą portalu Twitter/X. Analiza wykonana z pomocą metod NLP (Natural Language Processing).
Sponsor
The research was funded by the Polish National Science Centre (NCN) under grant title “Historical narratives in Web 2.0 as a functional element of national identities in Central and Eastern Europe” (2020/39/B/HS3/01237). The computational component was performed with the cooperation of the Centre of Informatics Tricity Academic Supercomputer and Network (TASK) in Gdańsk using the computing cloud TASKcloud. Katarzyna Kwiatkowska- Moskalewicz was supported by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA). Marcin Moskalewicz was supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
Keywords
Twitter, Holocaust, antisemitism, memory war, historical narratives, sentiment bias
Citation
"Rethinking History Rethinking History The Journal of Theory and Practice" Volume 27, 2023 - Issue 4