Production of Islamophobic Discourse in New Media: Example of Facebook

Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter represent a global forum where people can quickly reach news and information, re-read and discuss about the news and the information. Social networks are used as an effective and fast method from famous people to artists and politicians to convey and divert their ideas to the population. Because of all these features, social networks have become more preferable in discourse production and distribution than in traditional media. On Facebook, 35 sites with Islamophobic discourse were identified. In this study, ‘Anti-Islamic Alliance’ and ‘Stop Islamization of The World’ sites were selected from 35 Islamophobic sites with the ‘intentional random sampling’ method. The contents published between 2017 and 2018 in the posts section on both sites and the comments under these posts were included in the study. In terms of the limitation of the research, 10 contents, which are the most liked, commented or shared among the news, photos and videos published, have been examined with critical discourse analysis. As a result of the study, it is seen that the word Muslim was commemorated with words such as barbarian, satanical, bigot, uneducated, terrorist, harsh, wild, ravenous in the posts. Islamic religion was likewise characterized by negative titles such as terrorist religion, pedophilia-supporter religion, a totalitarian ideology, cult of the devil, religion of ‘barbarous’ and ‘primitive’ societies, ideological weapon of war