Twitter "Hashjacked": Online Polarisation Strategies of Germany's Political Far-Right (original) (raw)
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How to Hijack Twitter: Online Polarisation Strategies of Germany's Political Far-Right
2020
With a network approach, we examine the case of the German far-right party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) and their potential use of a "hashjacking" strategy. Our findings suggest that right-wing politicians (and their supporters/retweeters) actively and effectively polarise the discourse not just by using their own party hashtags, but also by "hashjacking" the political party hashtags of other established parties. The results underline the necessity to understand the success of right-wing parties, online and in elections, not entirely as a result of external effects (e.g. migration), but as a direct consequence of their digital political communication strategy.
How the Far-Right Polarises Twitter: ‘Hashjacking’ as a Disinformation Strategy in Times of COVID-19
Springer eBooks, 2022
Twitter influences political debates. Phenomena like fake news and hate speech show that political discourse on micro-blogging can become strongly polarised by algorithmic enforcement of selective perception. Some political actors actively employ strategies to facilitate polarisation on Twitter, as past contributions show, via strategies of 'hashjacking' 4. For the example of COVID-19 related hashtags and their retweet networks, we examine the case of partisan accounts of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and their potential use of 'hashjacking' in May 2020. Our findings indicate that polarisation of political party hashtags has not changed significantly in the last two years. We see that right-wing partisans are actively and effectively polarising the discourse by 'hashjacking' COVID-19 related hashtags, like #CoronaVirusDE or #FlattenTheCurve. This polarisation strategy is dominated by the activity of a limited set of heavy users. The results underline the necessity to understand the dynamics of discourse polarisation, as an active political communication strategy of the far-right, by only a handful of very active accounts.
How the Far-Right Polarises Twitter: 'Highjacking' Hashtags in Times of COVID-19
Social Science Research Network, 2020
Twitter influences political debates. Phenomena like fake news and hate speech show that political discourse on micro-blogging can become strongly polarised by algorithmic enforcement of selective perception. Some political actors actively employ strategies to facilitate polarisation on Twitter, as past contributions show, via strategies of 'hashjacking'; the use of someone else’s hashtag in order to promote one's own social media agenda. For the example of COVID-19 related hashtags and their retweet networks, we examine the case of partisan accounts of the German far-right party Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) and their potential use of 'hashjacking' in May 2020. Our findings indicate that polarisation of political party hashtags has not changed significantly in the last two years. We see that right-wing partisans are actively and effectively polarising the discourse by 'hashjacking' COVID-19 related hashtags, like #CoronaVirusDE or #FlattenTheCurve. T...
Social Network Analysis and Mining
Political campaign activities are increasingly digital. A crucial part of digital campaigning is communication efforts on social media platforms. As a forum for political discourse and political communication, parties and candidates on Twitter share public messages and aim to attract media attention and persuade voters. Party or prominent candidate hashtags are a central element of the campaign communication strategy since journalists and citizens search for these hashtags to follow the current debate concerning the hashed party or political candidate. Political elites and partisans use social media strategically, e.g., to link their messages to a broader debate, increase the visibility of messages, criticize other parties, or take over their hashtags (hashjacking). This study investigates the cases of the most recent 2017 and 2021 German federal elections called 'Bundestagswahlen'. The investigation (1) identifies communities of partisans in retweet networks in order to ana...
Media and Communication, 2022
Literature on influence operations highlights the coordinated actions of digital activists aimed at persuading audiences. Scholars have discussed many angles of this behavior and emphasized repertoires based on specific contentious actions. However, little is discussed about how these disputes allow us to apprehend different models of political action in polarized contexts. On a whole, studies have not considered a broader understanding of digital activism performed by supporters of far-right governments. How does the far-right spread its agenda and support the government in "hashtag wars"? What kind of strategies are employed? This study seeks to compare patterns of coordinated behavior in hashtags created by supporters and detractors of the Bolsonaro government in Brazil that occupied the trending topics on Twitter. The statistical analysis is based on 6.1 million tweets taken from 20 political hashtags collected over a three-month period from May to July 2020. Data was scraped using Twitter's Search API v3.0 for academic use. We analyzed the overall volume and peaks of tweets, the users they engaged with, and their network of influence, as well as the length of each hashtag. The results show an intense use of hashtag activism by Bolsonaro supporters, with users struggling for greater prominence in social media in the face of political events in Brazil. This article sheds light on how the far-right appropriates digital platforms to promote the government's public image in times of political tension and how it promotes coordinated actions aimed at framing social media audiences.
European Societies, 2020
Recent elections in Europe have demonstrated a steady rise in the success of right-wing populist parties. While advancing an anti-immigration agenda, these parties have been adamant to distance themselves from 'right-wing extremism'. This article analyses a sample of tweets collected from the Twitter accounts of the German AfD, Identitarian Movement and the Autonomous Nationalists by employing frame analysis. We conclude that the frames of far-right actors classified as extremist, New Right, and populist in fact converge and we discuss our findings in the context of related case studies in other European countries.
Communication & Society, 2020
The advance of populism in Europe and the positioning of this type of politics on the Web are both facts substantiated by scientific research. In this connection, a platform like Twitter serves as a stage for dissemination, interaction, mobilisation and building the personality of influencer/leaders and as a strategic tool for the selection of issues and for propaganda and fake news. The main objective is to know the impact that this communication model has on both digital users and the media, particularly in electoral processes. To this end, a quantitative-qualitative comparative content analysis, which studies the issue frame and the game frame, is performed on the personal Twitter accounts of Marine Le Pen (@MLP_officiel), the leader of Rassemblement National (RN) in France, Matteo Salvini (@matteosalvinimi), the leader of Liga Norte (LN) in Italy, and Santiago Abascal (@Santi_ABASCAL), the leader of Vox in Spain. In the context of the European elections held on the 26 May 2019, a sample of 2,187 tweets, user metrics ('likes,' retweets and comments) and their reproduction in the digital newspapers @lemondefr, @repubblica and @el_país are analysed. The initial results evince a strategic use of online tools, with a media and public response that reproduces the populist discourse of the far-right, to the point of making it go viral.
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The term ‘populist actors’ vaguely describes certain political parties and figures on the edges of the ideological spectrum. Theoretically, it assumes that there are similar communicative features among right-left populist actors since they are given the same label. Nevertheless, most studies have indicated that scholars hold contradicting viewpoints on this issue. This dispute continues when scholarly attention is being directed worldwide to the social media communication of right-wing and left-wing populist parties/politicians. In view of the conflicting insights of previous research, this study investigates whether the conventional left-right distinction makes it possible to differentiate populist communicative patterns found on social media. By proposing a theoretical framework combining populist rhetoric and communication styles, we argue that right-wing and left-wing populist actors are alike in using social media to disseminate such populist rhetoric, while sharing similar co...
Communication & Society, 2020
New technologies allow politicians to spread their messages omitting the role of mediators. In this context, the Internet has also promoted the emergence of a new actor, digital opinion leaders, who go beyond traditional politics and seek to set the public agenda. One of the main questions nowadays is whether social media, and in particular Twitter as a consolidated tool for political communication, is only used as a sounding board for their political statements, spurring the messages of populist forces. With this in mind, the main objective of this research is to explore the influence of the far-right in the public debate of political leaders on Twitter, analyzing the specific case of the Andalusian regional elections held in December 2018. These elections can be considered a political turning point, with an extreme right party winning seats in a Spanish regional election for the first time in 35 years. In this paper we analyze if Vox used a differentiated strategy via this social network compared to the candidates of the traditional parties: PSOE, PP, Ciudadanos, and Adelante Andalucía. Using content analysis on Twitter as a method, this research determines how Vox candidates worked as influencers of the digital political debate, despite being extra-parliamentary. Vox marked the agenda for the rest of the leaders, while generating great expectation among the audience.