A few weeks ago, the Slovakian NGO Institute for Public Questions (IVO) released the results of a comprehensive quantitative survey focusing on the online behaviour of young Slovaks. It came to quite a few important and staggering conclusions: the media immediately jumped on the revelation that the party with the most support from voters aged between 18 and 39 (although it remains somewhat questionable whether middle-aged people should be considered “young Slovaks”) was the People’s Party of Our Slovakia (Ľudová strana Naše Slovensko – ĽSNS) led by the infamous fascist leader Marián Kotleba. Nevertheless, the survey tells us that around a quarter of young Slovaks would vote for ĽSNS and ninety per cent of them have no qualms about their style, political program and plans. Furthermore, a third of Slovakia’s youth openly sympathizes with the values and activities of the party. During the last parliamentary elections, when ĽSNS gained over 8% of the vote, it had the support of 22% of first-time voters – and their electorate consisted of 70% of people under the age of 39. [...]
The employment policies of Slovak governments have displayed signs of labour precarization for a long time, and together with their investment policy, this resulted in a situation where we can find the sixth richest region in EU, Bratislava, in the same country as the extremely poor areas of central and eastern Slovakia, such as Rimavská Sobota, Revúca, Velký Krtíš, Kežmarok, Gelnica, Trebišov or Sabinov. It is no coincidence that some of these places lie in the Banská Bystrica region, for the last three years led by the fascist Kotleba. These areas suffer from high unemployment as well as the lowest education level and room space per person in the country. Households without fresh running water are a fairly common sight. The poverty line in Slovakia is set to 347 euro and 640 000 people are directly threatened by poverty, many of whom are families with children. [...]
What is also worth our attention amongst the survey results is the lack of an easily defined relationship between political orientation and digital literacy. It turns out the young voters of the fascist ĽSNS are the most active when it comes to looking up information online (right above the voter base of SaS) – although they often resort to sources typologically similar to Breitbart News. Anti-systemic thinking is fueled by false alarms, hoaxes or conspiracy theories; these can entertain and articulate one’s political views in exactly the same way as criticism based on working with mainstream media sources. From the point of view of search engine algorithms and social networks segmenting content for end-users, there are no real differences between these two kinds of infotainment. And it is digital platforms that are becoming the meta-media of today, generating social realities and creating mutually impermeable bubbles. The public, as the nexus of communicative activity in Slovakia, is slowly ebbing out – as society takes a downward spiral towards becoming a constellation of parallel universes that can apparently only be helped by mutual collision.
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