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

Abstract

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.

Online anti-immigrant discourse in Germany: ethnographically backed analysis of user comments

“…Subsequently, an anthropologist on the team carried out detailed qualitative content coding of this corpus, building on some of the key pointers from first level coding done by factcheckers, as the foundation for both our subsequent analyses: thematic analysis and lexical discourse analysis. We adopted theoretically informed inductive thematic coding, employing a bottom-up approach and deriving labels for themes and styles of anti-immigrant extremist speech from our ethnographic research on right-wing nationalist discourse online, supplemented by relevant literature (Aslanidis, 2018;Paasch-Colberg et al, 2021;Puschmann et al, 2022) and dialogues with factcheckers. One of the authors (LN), proficient in both German and English, conducted the coding, identifying themes and styles by examining passages in their original language within the posts and clustering the segments into overarching themes and styles based on their content.…”

“…With an aim to overcome the challenge of a "hate/no-hate dichotomy" (p. 177), they combine qualitative text annotation with "standardized labeling, " "in which hate speech is not directly identified by coders but results from …[a] combination of different characteristics, " which they identify as "negative stereotyping, dehumanizing speech and expression of violence" (p. 172). Similarly, Gründl (2022) and Puschmann et al (2022) have developed automated dictionary-based content analysis approaches to measure official populist communication and right-wing populist conspiracy theories in the German speaking context on social media.…”

Mapping a Dark Space: Challenges in Sampling and Classifying Non- Institutionalized Actors on Telegram

“…For example, Curley et al (2022) use terms from the "Hatebase" lexicon, which provides racist and hate speech terms (p. 6) to identify "actors posting far-right content. " Other dictionaries provide computational actor classification methods, such as the RPC-Lex, a dictionary developed for the study of right-wing populist conspiracy (RPC) content in German-language texts (Puschmann et al, 2022). However, dictionaries require case-specific adaptations and ex tensive validation procedures to ensure that inferences from content to actor characteristics are appropriate.…”

Conspiracy theories in digital environments: Moving the research field forward

“…Following the three empirical papers of conspiracy theories and far-right politics is a methodology paper – ‘RPC-Lex: A Dictionary to Measure German Right Wing Populist Conspiracy Discourse Online’. Contextualised in contemporary German politics, Puschmann and colleagues (2022) introduced PRC-Lex, a computational dictionary to study right-wing conspiracy narratives. In the paper, the authors provide a detailed description of their approach to constructing and validating the dictionary and demonstrate its application with online comments related to conspiracy theories from alternative news websites and Facebook.…”