TY - GEN
T1 - ‘Dark Germany’
T2 - 9th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2017
AU - Schelter, Sebastian
AU - Kunegis, Jérôme
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments. This research was partly funded by the Development Fund (ERDF/FEDER – IDEES).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.
Copyright:
Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85029497505&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.mendeley.com/research/dark-germany-hidden-patterns-participation-online-farright-protests-against-refugee-housing
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_17
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_17
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85029497505
SN - 9783319672168
VL - 10539 LNCS
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 277
EP - 288
BT - Social Informatics - 9th International Conference, SocInfo 2017, Proceedings
PB - Springer Verlag
Y2 - 13 September 2017 through 15 September 2017
ER -