DIMENSIONS OF USER-GENERATED EVIL IN NEW MEDIA: A CASE STUDY OF TWITTER

Abstract

Depending on the rapid development of communication technologies with the Internet, the traditional communication process is also changing. The user is no longer limited to the passive receiver location, but can also be a sender. So users now have the opportunity to write, speak, share, and even set up their own channel and broadcast. This study focuses on the transformation of the active user in new media and the resulting evil events. The Başaran Holding jet crash, which took place in 2018, and included different discourse themes, was chosen as an example case for the situation in question. The jet crash has been on the agenda in traditional and new media; It has been discussed extensively on the Twitter platform. For this reason, the case was examined through tweets collected from Twitter. Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis, which is more suitable for the scope of the study, was chosen as the data analysis method. As a result, it has become clear how easily one can move away from certain traditions and customs and common moral norms that were settled in a society when conditions change. The conditions in question are switching from face-to-face communication to interface communication and hiding real identities with fake accounts. In addition, it has been found that platform providers, as profit-making companies, allow evil to breed with the limits they draw and the opportunities they offer to the user. In addition, it has been revealed again that those who produce the news, which Van Dijk describes as the symbolic elite, act with commercial concerns, cause the unequal social structure to continue, feed the existing power structures, and have a manipulative power on the society. In addition, the types of evil committed by users in the new media were defined and the type of evil committed in the sample case was determined as cyber-vilification, one of the types of cyberbullying