Converging on a nativist core? Comparing issues on the Facebook pages of the Pegida movement and the Alternative for Germany

Puschmann, Cornelius; Ausserhofer, Julian; Šlerka, Josef

doi:10.1177/0267323120922068

Cited by 14 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(58 reference statements)

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“…With particular focus on right-wing movements, Stier et al (2017) compared Facebook use by Pegida and German political parties, showing that both right-wing populist actors, Pegida and the AfD party, appeal to similar target groups. With regards to user engagement, Puschmann et al (2020) also compared the Facebook pages of Pegida and the AfD party using an inductive computational approach. They find that the prevalence of shared issues, such as immigration differed between the two pages in general, and also changed over time.…”

Section: Related Work On Social Media Representations Of Right-wing Movementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Limited Influence of Right-Wing Movements on Social Media User Engagement

Schwemmer

2021

Social Media + Society

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This article generates new insights into the dynamic interplay between social media content generated by right-wing movements, user engagement, and the public attention movements receive. I argue that movement leaders seek to achieve high user engagement for utilizing mechanisms of information diffusion to increase both online and on-site mobilization. In a case study, I analyze the German right-wing movement Pegida, which uses Facebook for spreading its anti-Islam agenda online. Data from Pegida’s Facebook page are combined with news reports over a period of 18 months to measure activity on Facebook and in the public sphere simultaneously. Results of quantitative text and time series analysis show that Pegida cannot influence user engagement by simply creating more posts. Instead, it is the content of posts that matters. Moreover, findings highlight a strong connection between Facebook activities and the public sphere. In times of decreasing attention, the movement changes its social media strategy in response to exogenous shocks: Pegida resorts increasingly to radical mobilization methods by posting xenophobic content that is more likely to incite users to engage on Facebook.

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Section: Related Work On Social Media Representations Of Right-wing Movementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Limited Influence of Right-Wing Movements on Social Media User Engagement

Schwemmer

2021

Social Media + Society

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“…For instance, Nicholls and Culpepper (2020) show how STM performs to identify frames based upon the content of articles. Also, Puschmann et al (2020) use STM to study the evolving agendas of right-wing movements and parties on Facebook.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Methodologically, our contribution is demonstrating how STM can add to the analysis of political fragmentation in the online domain. STM has been increasingly used within the field of political communication (Nicholls and Culpepper 2020; Puschmann et al 2020). We show how STM can be applied, in combination with tools borrowed from network science, to investigate topic overlaps between media outlets and political actors and thereby assess the levels of political fragmentation in the online domain.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do Not Blame the Media! The Role of Politicians and Parties in Fragmenting Online Political Debate

Heiberger

Majó-Vázquez

Castro

et al. 2021

The International Journal of Press/Politics

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Democratic politics builds on both clear differences and shared common ground. While the rise of digital media may have enabled more differences to be articulated, common ground is often seen as threatened by fragmentation of political debate, which some see as driven by news media. The relative importance of political actors (parties and politicians) in driving fragmentation has received less attention. In this paper, we compare how news media and political actors contribute to the fragmentation of online political debate on the basis of analysis of almost half a million election-related tweets collected during the 2017 French, German, and U.K. national elections. We employ a structural topic model to reduce online political debate to networks of topic overlap. Across the three countries with different political and media systems, we find news media are by far the most important actors in terms of creating and maintaining a common space of online political debate on Twitter. Our results also show that political actors, with some variation from country to country, contribute more to fragmentation as they focus on different topics while articulating clear differences. These findings underline the importance of complementing structural analysis of the rise of digital and social media with analysis of how important elite actors like news media and political parties/candidates use these media in different ways. Overall, we show how at least on Twitter, across three different countries with different media systems and political systems, news media create connection that contributes to commonality while political actors lay out clear differences that drive fragmentation.

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“…To summarize, there has been a considerable growth of right-wing populist protests, movements and parties in Germany, which substantially base their raison d’être on conspiracy theories such as the ‘Great Replacement’ while making vast use of online communication and social media ( Puschmann et al, 2020 ). Germany is one of the most influential political and economic players in Europe and is home to a stack of right-wing (populist) movements that have gained momentum over the course of the past decades.…”

Section: Right-wing Populist Conspiracy Discourse and The German Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Conspiracy theories are frequently deployed by fringe political actors that aim to undermine political institutions and boost their own claims to legitimacy. Examples on the right include individual politicians, parties and movements ( Engesser et al, 2017 ; Gerbaudo, 2018 ; Puschmann et al, 2020 ). Conspiracy theories relating to controversial political issues in particular appear to activate supporters of both right-wing and left-wing causes by tapping into strong emotions, such as alienation, fear and resentment ( Hameleers, 2021 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

RPC-Lex: A dictionary to measure German right-wing populist conspiracy discourse online

Puschmann

Karakurt

Amlinger

et al. 2022

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Med

Self Cite

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We describe a novel computational dictionary for the study of right-wing populist conspiracy discourse ( RPC) on the internet, specifically in the context of contemporary German politics. After first presenting our definition of conspiracy discourse and grounding it in antecedent research on mediated rhetoric at the intersection of right-wing populism and conspiracy theory, we proceed by outlining our approach to dictionary construction, relying on a combination of manual and automated methods. We validate our dictionary via parallel manual coding of 2,500 sentences using the categories contained in the dictionary as labels and compare the consensus result with the label assigned to each sentence by the dictionary, achieving satisfactory results. We then test our approach on two different datasets composed of alternative news articles and Facebook comments that spread conspiracy theories. Finally, we summarize our observations both on the methodological premises of the approach and on the object of populist right-wing conspiracy discourse and its dynamics more broadly. We close with an outlook on the potentials and limitations of the dictionary-based approach and future directions in applications of content analysis to the study of conspiracy discourse.

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Converging on a nativist core? Comparing issues on the Facebook pages of the Pegida movement and the Alternative for Germany

Cited by 14 publications

References 49 publications

The Limited Influence of Right-Wing Movements on Social Media User Engagement

The Limited Influence of Right-Wing Movements on Social Media User Engagement

Do Not Blame the Media! The Role of Politicians and Parties in Fragmenting Online Political Debate

RPC-Lex: A dictionary to measure German right-wing populist conspiracy discourse online

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