The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the ‘passivation’ of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage’s heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system.

This research note introduces the EPINetz Twitter Politicians Dataset, a comprehensive dataset of 2449 Twitter accounts of German parliamentarians, minsters, state secretaries, parties, and ministries on a state, federal, and European Union level for the year 2021. This hand-curated dataset not only provides up-to-date information on elected officials, but it also includes additional variables such as their party affiliation, age, and gender. Furthermore, it provides linkages to additional data sources by providing the accounts’ Wikidata and Abgeordnetenwatch (Parliamentwatch) IDs. While it does not provide actual tweet data, the dataset will be a valuable resource for researchers by providing easy access to elected German politicians. We demonstrate some of the dataset’s uses with an analysis of the 2021 German Federal Elections. The full dataset can be accessed via 10.7802/2415.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a critical phase for the transnationalization of public spheres. Against this backdrop, we ask how transnational COVID-19 related online discourse has been throughout the EU over the first year of the pandemic. Which events triggered higher transnational coherence or national structuration of this specific issue public on Twitter? In order to study these questions, we rely on Twitter data obtained from the TBCOV database, i.e., a dataset for multilingual, geolocated COVID-19 related Twitter communication. We selected corpora for the 27 member states of the EU plus the United Kingdom. We defined three research periods representing different phases of the pandemic, namely April (1st wave), August (interim) and December 2020 (2nd wave) resulting in a set of 51,893,966 unique tweets for comparative analysis. In order to measure the level and temporal variation of transnational discursive linkages, we conducted a spatiotemporal network analysis of so-called Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs). HINs allow for the integration of multiple, heterogeneous network entities (hashtags, retweets, @-mentions, URLs and named entities) to better represent the complex discursive structures reflected in social media communication. Therefrom, we obtained an aggregate measure of transnational linkages on a daily base by relating these linkages back to their geolocated authors. We find that the share of transnational discursive linkages increased over the course of the pandemic, indicating effects of adaptation and learning. However, stringent political measures of crisis management at the domestic level (such as lockdown decisions) caused stronger national structuration of COVID-19 related Twitter discourse.

ZusammenfassungDer Artikel beleuchtet das Verhältnis von Technik und Politischer Theorie in der digitalen Konstellation, indem auf Hubigs technikphilosophische Konzeption von Technik als Medium zurückgegriffen wird. Der mediale Charakter technischer Systeme besteht dabei in der Strukturierung des Möglichkeitsraums, in welchem Handlungen erst vorstellbar werden. In diesem Sinne kann Technik als Weltbezug gefasst werden, welcher mit den Akteur:innen eigenen epistemischen Dispositionen in einem dialektischen Verhältnis steht. Anhand des Beispiels digitaler Öffentlichkeit wird illustriert, inwiefern diese Strukturierung epistemischer Möglichkeitsräume durch Technik Gegenstand einer präzisen politiktheoretischen Analyse sein muss. Für die Reflexion des dialektischen Verhältnisses epistemischer Dispositionen und technischer Vermittlung wird weiterhin der Begriff der Affordanzen vorgeschlagen, dessen Mehrwert mit Blick auf die Plattform Twitter aus öffentlichkeitstheoretischer Perspektive illustriert wird. Der Beitrag knüpft somit einerseits an die Diskussion um die Theoretisierung digitaler Technologien an, indem er Perspektiven der Politischen Theorie, der Technikphilosophie und der Science and Technology Studies verbindet. Andererseits greift er Diskussionsstränge um die Epistemologie der digitalen Konstellation auf, indem er auf das Verhältnis zwischen Politischer Theorie und digitalen Phänomenen eingeht. Überlegungen zu der spezifischen Messbarkeit dieser Phänomene knüpfen darüber hinaus an Fragen der Vereinbarkeit von Theorie und Empirie an.