The politicisation of historical memory on Twitter: “Positive antisemitism” in the Holocaust debate in Poland

Abstract

ABSTRACT Political controversies concerning the memory of historical events have adapted to the digital specificity of Twitter and are currently growing in significance. This study investigates the sentiment bias of a memory war between two major Polish political parties, the currently ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party and Civic Platform (PO), the main opposition party, concerning Polish-Jewish relations, and especially the Holocaust. Totally, 23699 PO Tweets and 29,441 PiS Tweets from 2015 to 2019 were collected, out of which, 241 concerning memory war were sampled with a lexicon-based approach. Sentiment was analysed using tweet-based consensual coding with an ordinal five-point scale and automated word-based coding with a three-point scale. PiS tweets had more positive sentiment regarding the memory of the Holocaust and Jewish legacy in Poland. The final hermeneutical analysis showed that the rulling party narratives were aimed appropriation of collective memory and “Polonizing” the Holocaust, and that the positive sentiment was a function of ‘positive anti-Semitism’.