Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

Digitally-mediated political rhetoric warrants exploration for its continued potency in the new media environment. The potential of social platforms to function as vehicles of effective political messaging has been realized by political actors around the world, the prime example being Donald Trump’s historically unprecedented rise to the American presidency, which has been largely attributed to his strategic and polarizing use (or abuse) of Twitter as an instrument of political persuasion and propaganda. Social platforms have been widely employed by far-right populist and extremist political cultures, who had previously resided on the fringes of social and political life. With their inherent affordances for reach immediacy, interactivity and personalization, digital media have proven to be vital instruments of political discourse in the service of a variety of far right formations and their ideologies, including neo-fascism, neo-Nazism, xenophobia, racism, anti-communism and opposition to immigration, in Europe and around the world. Socially-mediated environments have in effect materialized a “political opportunities” structure (Tarrow, 2011), one which far-right groups and parties have harnessed strategically as a discursive resource and a medium for public communication (Ernst et al. 2017). This study examines how Golden Dawn has been historically employing the microblogging platform of Twitter to project its political agenda and elicit the support of their online publics. Its unique characteristics notwithstanding, the Golden Dawn - an extreme right-wing party that entered the Greek Parliament in the 2012 elections and which currently holds the third place in it with 17 seats - is one of the most prominent manifestations of the larger phenomenon of the mainstreaming of previously fringe right-wing formations in other European countries and their alarming rise to power (Bounegru, 2017). Recurring issues of its agenda have been anti-corruption of the political elites, law and order, respect for the Orthodox Church, anti-immigration, hard Euroscepticism, anti-globalism, anti-communism, and a neo-Nazi background which it has been trying to conceal. At the same time, it has been practicing a form of “racial humanitiarianism” and “ecological consciousness” with various social solidarity activities.This study presents the preliminary findings of an ongoing research that examines Golden Dawn’s Twitter discourse based on historical data drawn from the party’s official Twitter account, covering a period of 4 years (2014-2017). It applies a qualitative content analysis methodology in order to systematically investigate the party’s Twitter-disseminated semiotic data (tweets, images, visuals) and the frames and the discursive strategies it uses in order to persuade its networked audiences. Research findings illustrate how strategies of persuasion, mobilization and polarization are being realized in the party’s digitally-mediated visual and textual discourse. Drawing from existing typologies of rhetorical discourse, such as Van Leeuwen’s legitimation categories (2007) of authorization, rationalization, moral evaluation, and mythopoesis, and within a framework of rhetorical political analysis (Atkins & Finlayson, 2013; Finlayson, Golden Dawn’s institutional texts on Twitter are analyzed within their interactive and socially-mediated context.