“Don't trust the media – it costs lives.” : A corpus linguistic study of the mainstream media criticism and deplatforming discussion in the Swedish far-right alternative media

• Main Author: Ljunggren Forsberg, Vilma
• Format: Others
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Södertörns högskola, Journalistik 2021
• Subjects: far-right alternative media; mainstream media; media criticism; social media; deplatforming; “the myth of the mediated centre”; anti-systemness; public service; corpus linguistics; General Language Studies and Linguistics; Jämförande språkvetenskap och allmän lingvistik; Communication Studies; Kommunikationsvetenskap; Media Studies; Medievetenskap
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-46692

This study investigates how the Swedish far-right alternative media's criticize the Swedish mainstream media and discusses the contemporary phenomenon of “deplatforming”. Deplatforming refers to when a user or uploaded content is banned from a social media platform. The study investigates linguistic features of these questions, through the method of corpus linguistics and the software AntConc. Altogether, 72515 tokens from four Swedish online far-right alternative media are analyzed, showing that the far-right alternative media criticize the mainstream media in a highly politicized way, posing a binary antagonist relationship where power is a central theme. Regarding deplatforming, the study shows how the Swedish far-right alternative media focus on deplatforming especially when it regards far-right activists or politicians, and then have a jeering attitude towards the given reasons for the seclusion. The study also includes a theoretical discussion, wherein the chosen Swedish far-right alternative media showed an overestimation of the power and influence of the mainstream media (as theoreticized by Nick Couldy, 2014). Likewise, the scrutinized data showed signs of relational anti-systemness (as theoreticized by Kristoffer Holt, 2018).