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Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss cases of racialization and extreme speech in dialogical blogs (weblogs), Facebook exchanges, and website news commentaries in Denmark relating to issues of migration, Islam, racialization and radicalization.

Paper long abstract:

With the 15-year-long decline of newspapers sold in Denmark, scholars have anticipated that online social media blogs could serve to democratize public debate not least because of the explosive growth of people engaged in social media debates. This paper takes the analysis of racialization to interactive and dialogical blogs (weblogs), Facebook exchanges, and website news commentaries that are related to issues of migrants, migration, Islam, ethnicity, race, and radicalization.In particular, we are interested in the extreme speech, ‘ritualized adversativeness’, and the indifference to facts in a number of Danish Facebook exchanges and Web-News commentaries. The project adheres to the media-anthropological insistence on not looking exclusively at actors in online social networks, but in all social fields of interaction, emphasizing that authors in the social media networks are also engaged in the articulation of activities outside the social media world, such as public events. Therefore, offline engagement with Internet actors and commentators is one of the prerequisites of this study including in-depth interviewing. The paper will present and discuss cases that are being collected in the spring of 2016 comprising Danish debates that connects Islam, multiculturalism and liberals.