The Social Power Dynamics of Post-Truth Politics: How the Greek Youth Perceives the 'Powerful' Foreigners and Constructs the Image of the European Partners

Paper Proposal 1. Dr. Persefoni Zeri, Professor at Panteion University, Athens, Greece 2. Dr. Charalambos Tsekeris, Researcher on Digital Sociology at the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE), Athens, Greece 3. Dr. Theodore Tsekeris, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre of Planning and Economic Research (KEPE), Athens, Greece The social power dynamics of post-truth politics: How the Greek youth perceives the “powerful” foreigners and constructs the image of the European partners Several recent surveys on the Greek youth and its perception of the European Union have offered interesting accounts highlighting youngsters’ Euroscepticism. The scope of this research concerns young Greeks aged between 18 and 31 and will examine how they perceive the “We” and the powerful “Others” in cyberspace (online newspapers, news portals, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.) and in the real world, within the context of the current economic crisis. Since both reality and factual truth are nontransparent concepts, the aim is therefore to investigate the relationship between media reality and “facts”, how “real” is reality, to what extent the constructed reality is “true”, what is the reality that the Greek youth in their plurality perceive about “us” and the “powerful Others”. A mixed methodological approach is developed, following a “social epidemiological” analytical framework and highlighting the relational character of post-truth dynamics. A qualitative research is first conducted with 20 in-depth qualitative interviews, which include young interviewees from the entire political spectrum: far right, radical left, center right, center left; it is then tried to decipher the specificities of their social-historically founded ideological horizon concerning the perception of Troika/Germans. Furthermore. An online questionnaire follows which aims to collect data on users’ preferences as well as to compare online and offline post-truth political dynamics. The research findings will help to clarify the social-historical imaginary of the Greek youth concerning their self-perception and the perception of the supranational powerful “Others”. The empirical results of a questionnaire are used to investigate the young people’s preferences toward social media through a complex network analysis. This analysis allows us to identify the fragmentation of social media into communities according to distinct political attitudes and perceptions of their users about the “We”, the powerful “Others” and Europe. General-purpose popular social media such as Facebook and Twitter are found to possess the most central position in the network and exercise the largest influence on the information diffusion, encompassing a wide range of different user attitudes.