ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the strategic use of social media by 'Golden Dawn' (GD), focusing on the ways it attempts to legitimise its social imaginaries, tactics, strategies and reality constructions, taking advantage of the social turbulence that austerity politics and neo-liberal restructuring have brought since late 2009. The relativisation strategy is very important for GD, as crucial terms for their discourse, such as Nazism, Hitler or dictatorship, bear very negative connotations in the Greek public sphere. The relativisation strategy usually works alongside the promotion of a positive image of the party, mainly related with social work, such as staged blood and food donations only for Greeks and animal rights and ecological activism. Social media, then, through party member accounts that attempt daily to create an mediated intimacy, can become an instrument of the broader scope of Nazis to both disarticulate and occupy liberal power and the state apparatus in its existing form.
