Structural Patterns in the Rise of Germany’s New Right on Facebook

Schelter, Sebastian; Bießmann, Felix; Zobel, Malisa; Teneva, Nedelina

doi:10.1109/icdmw.2016.0069

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…The data included all comments and reactions to the posts and their respective comments. The number of posts is smaller in comparison to those collected by Arzheimer [1] or Schelter et al [52]. This is due to changes in the Facebook API.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 68%

“…As an outsider party, social media has been an important communication channel for the AfD since its foundation, because social media platforms provided a space to influence public opinion outside of the traditional media. In recent years, the AfD has been effective on social media as reported on media channels and in previous research: Arzheimer [1] analyzed Facebook posts from 2013 and 2014 and found that the AfD used more populist rhetoric on Facebook than it did on other communication channels; Schelter et al [52] evaluated the Facebook posts of six political parties in Germany in 2014 and 2015 and reported that social media was a major factor in the success of the AfD; and both Hegelich [23] and Medina Serrano et al [36] studied social media campaigns in the months leading up to the 2017 German federal election.…”

Section: The Afd's Social Media Strategymentioning

confidence: 81%

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The Rise of Germany's AfD

Serrano

Shahrezaye

Papakyriakopoulos

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society

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In 2017, a far-right party entered the German parliament for the first time in over half a century. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) became the third largest party in the government. Its campaign focused on Euroscepticism and a nativist stance against immigration. The AfD used all available social media channels to spread this message. This paper seeks to understand the AfD's social media strategy over the last years on the full gamut of social media platforms and to verify the effectiveness of the party's online messaging strategy. For this purpose, we collected data related to Germany's main political parties from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. This data was subjected to a unified multi-platform analysis, which relies on four measures: party engagement, user engagement, message spread, and acceptance. This analysis proves the AfD's superior online popularity relative to the rest of Germany's political parties. The evidence also indicates that automated accounts contributed to this online superiority. Finally, we demonstrate that as part of its social media strategy, the AfD avoided discussion of its economic proposals and instead focused on pushing its anti-immigration agenda to gain popularity. CCS CONCEPTS • Networks → Social media networks; • Human-centered computing → Social network analysis;

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 68%

Section: The Afd's Social Media Strategymentioning

confidence: 81%

The Rise of Germany's AfD

Serrano

Shahrezaye

Papakyriakopoulos

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society

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“…2 Distrust towards the established media has been widespread among supporters of populist, Eurosceptic parties, especially among AfD supporters in Germany. With the rise of the AfD , social media user engagement has risen dramatically in Germany (Schelter et al., 2016). Taken together, the focus on online user comments is likely to bias our results towards more, rather than less EU politicisation, which we take into account when interpreting the results.…”

Section: Datasetmentioning

confidence: 99%

Much ado about nothing? The (non-) politicisation of the European Union in social media debates on migration

Ademmer

Leupold

Stöhr

2018

European Union Politics

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The widespread view that the refugee crisis has sparked unprecedented levels of European Union politicisation has rarely been backed by systematic empirical evidence. We investigate this claim using a novel dataset of several thousand user comments posted below articles of German regional media outlets on Facebook. Despite considerable European Union authority in the policy area, extensive media coverage of the crisis and the rise of a populist party in Germany, our results suggest that the politicisation of Europe remains low among social media users, especially when compared to national and subnational levels of governance. When talking about Europe, users hardly refer to European Union institutions or policies. Instead, other member states and notions of the geographic or cultural space dominate the debate.

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“…Therefore, we analyse the affiliations of the users on these protest pages to political parties in Germany, with the aim to see whether these users are connected in that way. For that, we employ additional data about likes of posts on the parties' Facebook pages from our previous work [14]. Next, we compute the affiliation aff p,o between a page p and a political party o as the ratio of users U interacting with the page that also liked posts on the party's page:…”

Section: Strong Affiliation With Far-right Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The social media usage of political movements is of interest to many studies, e.g., with a focus on the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States [6,11]. However, the German far-right has seen little attention so far, with current research mostly focusing on exploratory analysis of the social media activities of the AfD party on Facebook [14] and the topics discussed by the local antiimmigrant movement Pegida [12] on Twitter, as well as their corresponding news sources [13]. The concentration on social concerns with crime and housing cost, and the focus on European policies in topic clusters discovered by Puschmann et al on Twitter closely resemble the topics we discovered in Section 3.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Dark Germany’: Hidden Patterns of Participation in Online Far-Right Protests Against Refugee Housing

Schelter

Kunegis

2017

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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The political discourse in Western European countries such as Germany has recently seen a resurgence of the topic of refugees, fueled by an influx of refugees from various Middle Eastern and African countries. Even though the topic of refugees evidently plays a large role in online and offline politics of the affected countries, the fact that protests against refugees stem from the right-wight political spectrum has lead to corresponding media to be shared in a decentralized fashion, making an analysis of the underlying social and mediatic networks difficult. In order to contribute to the analysis of these processes, we present a quantitative study of the social media activities of a contemporary nationwide protest movement against local refugee housing in Germany, which organizes itself via dedicated Facebook pages per city. We analyse data from 136 such protest pages in 2015, containing more than 46,000 posts and more than one million interactions by more than 200,000 users. In order to learn about the patterns of communication and interaction among users of far-right social media sites and pages, we investigate the temporal characteristics of the social media activities of this protest movement, as well as the connectedness of the interactions of its participants. We find several activity metrics such as the number of posts issued, discussion volume about crime and housing costs, negative polarity in comments, and user engagement to peak in late 2015, coinciding with chancellor Angela Merkel's much criticized decision of September 2015 to temporarily admit the entry of Syrian refugees to Germany. Furthermore, our evidence suggests a low degree of direct connectedness of participants in this movement, (i.a., indicated by a lack of geographical collaboration patterns), yet we encounter a strong affiliation of the pages' user base with far-right political parties.

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Structural Patterns in the Rise of Germany’s New Right on Facebook

Cited by 12 publications

References 7 publications

The Rise of Germany's AfD

The Rise of Germany's AfD

Much ado about nothing? The (non-) politicisation of the European Union in social media debates on migration

‘Dark Germany’: Hidden Patterns of Participation in Online Far-Right Protests Against Refugee Housing

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