Digitale Märkte und Öffentlichkeiten auf Plattformen

Dauerhafte URI für die Sammlung

https://www.weizenbaum-library.de/handle/id/309

Listen

Gerade angezeigt 1 - 14 von 14

Challenges of and approaches to data collection across platforms and time: Conspiracy-related digital traces as examples of political contention
(2024) Heft, Annett; Bühling, Kilian; Zhang, Xixuan; Schindler, Dominik; Milzner, Miriam
Taking the example of conspiracy-related communication online as one form of contentious politics, this study examines the data collection challenges for multidimensional comparative research across platforms, time, and cultural embeddings. It compares the architectures and features relevant to data collection, access regimes, and use cultures for a set of digital platforms and communication venues. Differentiating between actor- and content-based strategies, this study discusses the potentials and limitations of these approaches, considering differences in platforms, temporal dynamics, and cultural embeddings as well as several layers of equivalence. The discussion highlights crucial insights into designing data collection strategies in multidimensional comparative studies.
Conditions of Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres and Crisis of Democracy
(2023) Pfetsch, Barbara
Political campaigns have always been closely related to the technical conditions of media infrastructures, the social conditions of voters, and the political opportunities within which parties and movements compete. As campaigning has developed through the four ages of political communication (Blumler, Citation2015; Norris, Citation2002), it is now shaped by the affordances of digital platforms and networked communication ecologies in addition to legacy media infrastructures. In the environment of hybrid media systems (Chadwick, Citation2013), campaigning has also become hybrid – a task divided between the use of conventional information subsidies and the dynamics of social media and digital platforms (Azari, Citation2016; Wells et al., Citation2016). What is more, contemporary political communications and voter mobilization are taking place under two significant context conditions: dissonant public spheres (Pfetsch, Citation2018) are coinciding with a profound crisis of liberal democracy (Bennett & Livingston, Citation2018). The communication ecology and the state of democracy have produced a style of campaigning that is no longer geared toward a consensus among the established political elites and parties to engage in civilized speech, to conduct fair competition, and to stay within the limits and norms of democracy. In this essay, I shall discuss some of the features and consequences of these contextual conditions. I shall further argue that the coincidence of disrupted democracy and dissonant public spheres is related to profound structural changes in the party organization, campaigning and political leadership.
Die Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur – eine Lösung infrastruktureller Bedarfe für die Inhaltsanalyse?
(2023) Heft, Annett; Jünger, Jakob; Niemann-Lenz, Julia; Possler, Daniel
Obwohl die Inhaltsanalyse eine zentrale Stellung in der Kommunikations- und Medienforschung besitzt, existieren kaum Forschungsinfrastrukturen für diese Methode. Gleichzeitig werden in Deutschland seit 2018 große Dateninfrastrukturen in den 27 Konsortien der Nationalen Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) aufgebaut. In diesem Beitrag gehen wir aus Perspektive der Forschenden der Frage nach, inwiefern die NFDI-Konsortien Lösungen für die infrastrukturellen Anforderungen in Bezug auf Inhaltsanalysen bieten. Zunächst beleuchten wir diese Anforderungen entlang des Forschungsdaten-Lebenszyklus und identifizieren Leerstellen. Dann explorieren wir, welche Bedarfe die NFDI-Konsortien decken können. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf Konsortien, die sich auf die Sammlung und Aufbereitung von Text oder multimodalen Daten konzentrieren: KonsortSWD, BERD@NFDI, Text+, NFDI4Memory, NFDI4Culture und NFDI4DataScience. Unsere Untersuchung zeigt, dass die Konsortien bereits viele der Bedarfe abdecken. Allerdings gibt es weder ein Konsortium, in dem Kommunikationswissenschaftler:innen treibende Kräfte sind, noch wird die Inhaltsanalyse explizit berücksichtigt. Wir diskutieren, wie sich Forschungsinfrastrukturen für die Inhaltsanalyse durch die NFDI-Strukturen weiterentwickeln ließen. , Abstract Content analysis has a central position in media and communication research, yet research infrastructures for the method are still scarce. At the same time, the 27 consortia of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) have started to establish large data infrastructures in Germany since 2018. In this paper, we explore from the perspective of researchers whether the NFDI consortia provide solutions to the infrastructural needs of content analysis. First, we illustrate these needs throughout the research data lifecycle and identify shortcomings. We then explore whether the NFDI consortia can meet these needs. The focus lies on consortia that concentrate on the collection and processing of text or multimodal data: KonsortSWD, BERD@NFDI, Text+, NFDI4Memory, NFDI4Culture, and NFDI4DataScience . Our exploration shows that many of the needs are already being addressed by the consortia. However, there is no consortium in which communication scholars are the driving force and content analysis does not receive explicit consideration. We discuss how research infrastructures for content analysis can be further developed through the NFDI structures.
How COVID-19 and the News Shaped Populism in Facebook Comments in Seven European Countries: A Computational Analysis.
(2024) Thiele, Daniel
Citizen-generated populism is flourishing in the comments sections of online news. The factors that shape the extent of such populist communication from below are still under-researched. This study focuses on the COVID-19 crisis to examine how contextual and media-related factors are related to the extent of populism in comment sections on Facebook pages of news outlets from seven European countries (AT, DE, FR, IT, NL, SE and UK). Computational text analysis, machine translation and Bayesian multilevel regression were used to analyze digital trace data from 65,258 posts and 3.4 million comments published between February 2020 and June 2021. The computational measurements - multilingual dictionaries for posts and distributed dictionary representation to capture populism in comments - were rigorously validated. The results show that posts referring to the government, experts, COVID-19, and restrictions exhibit higher levels of populism in the comments sections. The stringency of containment policies was positively associated with populism in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands when COVID-19 was mentioned. Lower levels of populism were observed for tabloid media and when news outlets engaged in visible moderation. The implications of these findings beyond the pandemic context and methodological challenges are discussed.
“Intervening Is a Good Thing but . . .”: The Role of Social Norms in Users’ Justifications of (Non-)Intervention Against Incivility
(2023) Gagrčin, Emilija; Milzner, Miriam
User intervention against incivility as social enforcement of democratic norms on social media platforms is considered an act of “good citizenship” by citizens and scholars alike. However, between ideals and behavior, multiple social norms are at play in shaping individuals’ sense of personal responsibility for intervening. This study explores the role of conflicting norms in situations requiring user intervention against online incivility. By combining the perspectives of norms as expectations and norms as cultural vocabularies, we investigate users’ salient norms, and how these norms influence users’ justifications for (non-)intervention. Based on qualitative interview data from Germany (N = 20), we identified three distinct reasoning patterns employed to justify (non-)intervention: the pragmatic, the dismissive, and the aspirational. By identifying fault lines, our typology points to normative origins of ambivalence related to user intervention. The findings offer insights into strategies to motivate intervention against online incivility.
Mapping a Dark Space: Challenges in Sampling and Classifying Non-Institutionalized Actors on Telegram
(2023) Jost, Pablo; Heft, Annett; Bühling, Kilian; Zehring, Maximilian; Schulze, Heidi; Bitzmann, Hendrik; Domahidi, Emese
Crafted as an open communication platform characterized by high anonymity and minimal moderation, Telegram has garnered increasing popularity among activists operating within repressive political contexts, as well as among political extremists and conspiracy theorists. While Telegram offers valuable data access to research non-institutionalized activism, scholars studying the latter on Telegram face unique theoretical and methodological challenges in systematically defining, selecting, sampling, and classifying relevant actors and content. This literature review addresses these issues by considering a wide range of recent research. In particular, it discusses the methodological challenges of sampling and classifying heterogeneous groups of (often non-institutionalized) actors. Drawing on social movement research, we first identify challenges specific to the characteristics of non-institutionalized actors and how they become interlaced with Telegram’s platform infrastructure and requirements. We then discuss strategies from previous Telegram research for the identification and sampling of a study population through multistage sampling procedures and the classification of actors. Finally, we derive challenges and potential strategies for future research and discuss ethical challenges.
Message Deletion on Telegram: Affected Data Types and Implications for Computational Analysis
(Taylor & Francis, 2023) Bühling, Kilian
Ephemeral digital trace data can decrease the completeness, reproducibility, and reliability of social media datasets. Systematic post deletions thus potentially bias the results of computational methods used to map actors, content, and online information diffusion. Therefore, the aim of this study was to assess the extent and distribution of message deletion across different data types using data from the hybrid messenger service Telegram, which has experienced an influx of deplatformed users from mainstream social media platforms. A repeatedly scraped sample of messages from public Telegram groups and channels was used to investigate the effect of message ephemerality on the consistency of Telegram datasets. The findings revealed that message deletion introduces biases to the computational collection and analysis of Telegram data. Further, message ephemerality reduces dataset consistency, the quality of social network analyses, and the results of computational content analysis methods, such as topic modeling or dictionaries. The implications of these findings for scholars aiming to use Telegram data for computational research, possible solutions, and contributions to the methodological advancement of studying online political communication are discussed further in this article.
Pandemic protesters on Telegram: How platform affordances and information ecosystems shape digital counterpublics
(2023) Bühling, Kilian; Heft, Annett
This study analyzes how platform affordances, their appropriation by movement actors, and these actors’ leveraging of information ecosystems—in combination—helped form a digital counterpublic during the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws on public communication data sent by more than 300 Telegram channels and group chats affiliated with the Querdenken movement over a 2-year period, and combines automated and manual text classification with network analysis. The study demonstrates how Telegram afforded connective and collective action in distinct ways that reflected the movement’s organizational structure and aims, as well as the impact of individual information-sharing on the process of movement-building itself. Accounting for time-dependent dynamics, the study also found that different parts of the counterpublic latched onto and sustained distinct information ecosystems to articulate their claims and mobilize contentious action.
Politicization and Right-Wing Normalization on YouTube: A Topic-Based Analysis of the “Alternative Influence Network”
(2023) Knüpfer, Curd Benjamin; Schwemmer, Carsten; Heft, Annett
Scholarship has highlighted the rise of political influencer networks on YouTube, raising concerns about the platform’s propensity to spread and even incentivize politically extreme content. While many studies have focused on YouTube’s algorithmic infrastructure, limited research exists on the actual content in these networks. Building on Lewis’s (2018) classification of an “alternative influencer” network, we apply structural topic modeling across all text-based autocaptions from her study’s sample to identify common topics featured on these channels. This allows us to gauge which topics appear together and to trace politicization over time. Through network analysis, we determine channel similarities and evaluate whether deplatformed channels influenced topic shifts. We find that political topics increasingly dominate the focus of all analyzed channels. The convergence of culture and politics occurs mostly about identity-driven issues. Furthermore, more extreme channels do not form distinct clusters but blend into the larger content-based network. Our findings illustrate how political topics may function as connective ties across an initially more diverse network of YouTube influencer channels.
Resiliencia de las esferas públicas en la crisis sanitaria mundial
(2023) Trenz, Hans-Jörg; Heft, Annett; Vaughan, Michael; Pfetsch, Barbara
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the "normal" modes of functioning of the public sphere and activated an experimental mode of coping that has reinvented forms of public and communicative exchanges. In this article, we conceptualize the social responses triggered by the crisis as particular forms of public sphere resilience, and assess the role of digitization and digital spaces in the emergence of different modes and dynamics of resilience. In our conception, we examine three areas of public sphere experimentation: political consumption, political protest mobilization and news consumption. We discuss the general characteristics of public sphere resilience across social sub-spheres and highlight the dynamics and hybridisations that structure emerging public spaces. Resilience practices are accompanied by dynamics of politicisation and depoliticization, as well as shifts in the boundaries of the public and the private. Our observations also reveal the dynamic interplay between resilience and resistance.
Right Topic, Right Source? Source Diversity and Balance in Right-Wing Alternative News Content Across Topics
(2024) Heft, Annett; Ramsland, Tim; Mayerhöffer, Eva
This article investigates how the hybrid nature of right-wing alternative news media striving for journalistic legitimacy and partisan credibility plays out on source and topical diversity and balance in article content. The article draws on a sample of 1000 randomly selected articles published by 20 right-wing alternative online news media from six countries (the US, the UK, Germany, Austria, Denmark, and Sweden) from March 2019 to February 2020 (i.e., in “routine” pre-COVID-19 times). The results show that most of the alternative media outlets in the sample cover relatively broad topical spectra. More speciﬁcally, US and UK media primarily focus on politics and policy issues, whereas Scandinavian media are more heavily geared toward societal issues and crime coverage. Overall, right-wing alternative news content is characterized by a variety of partisan and non-partisan sources. However, core partisan topic areas, such as politics and mass media, are more likely to include partisan and especially right-wing sources. Often, with respect to these topics, right-wing sources are evaluated positively, and left-wing sources are evaluated negatively. Finally, right-wing and non-right-wing sources often appear in separate articles rather than in direct confrontation.
Same, same but different? Explaining issue agendas of right-wing parties’ Facebook campaigns to the 2019 EP election
(2023) Pfetsch, Barbara; Benert, Vivien; Heft, Annett
Social media are important for right-wing parties to communicate with and mobilize potential voters in election campaigns. Our study focuses on the Facebook campaigns of right-wing parties in six European countries and aims to understand which issues were transnationally shared and which ones emphasize national perspectives on the agenda of the populist actors. We ask what context conditions on the party- and country-level determine the individual issue agendas. Using structural topic modelling, we analyze the communication of the Austrian FPÖ, the German AfD, the French RN, the Italian Lega, the Polish PiS, and the Swedish SD during the 2019 EP election campaign. To explain their issue agendas, we run logistic regression models testing the influence of country-specific and party-specific factors. Our analyses establish that while right-wing parties across Europe are similar in pushing a few populist issues like blaming elites and immigration, they still engage in campaigning on national politics.
Varieties of antigenderism: the politicization of gender issues across three European populist radical right parties
(2023) Reinhardt, Susanne; Heft, Annett; Pavan, Elena
This research contributes to the study of populist radical right parties’ (PRRPs) role in gendered democratic backsliding by analyzing their articulation and symbolic representation of gender issues. We compare the politicization of gender issues across three European PRRPs, examining how context-speciﬁc gendered opportunity structures – the level of contestation of gender issues in their country, the resonance of antigenderism among their electorate, and their issue repertoire and historical trajectory – shape the extent and ways in which the German AfD, the Italian Lega and the Sweden Democrats politicize gender issues. We conduct a quantitative content analysis of PRRPs’ framing of gender issues and construct topic networks based on the parties’ Facebook and Twitter posts during the European Parliament election campaign 2019. We analyze the salience of gender issues, the broader topical context in which they are embedded, the speciﬁc gender issues addressed, and the parties’ positions on these issues. Our results show how context-speciﬁc gendered opportunities shape PRRPs’ national gender discourses: A low level of contestation, evidenced by a high public recognition and legal protection of gender and sexual equality, seems to foster a femonationalist framing, while antigenderist discourse is less pronounced in such a context. Instead, a higher level of contestation, expressed in a lower public recognition and legal protection of gender and sexual equality, seems to foster antigenderist discourse. A transnational femonationalist framing, shared by all analyzed parties, relates to a common nativist ideological core.
Veiled conspiracism: Particularities and convergence in the styles and functions of conspiracy-related communication across digital platforms
(2025) Buehling, Kilian; Zhang, Xixuan; Heft, Annett
Digital communication venues are essential infrastructures for anti-democratic actors to spread harmful content such as conspiracy theories. Capitalizing on platform affordances, they leverage conspiracy theories to mainstream their political views in broader public discourse. We compared the word choice, language style, and communicative function of conspiracy-related content to understand its platform-dependent differences and convergence. Our cases are the conspiracy theories of the New World Order and Great Replacement, which we analyzed on 4chan/pol/, Twitter, and seven alternative US news media longitudinally from 2011 to 2021. The conspiracy-related texts were comparatively analyzed using a multi-method approach of computational and quantitative text analyses. Our results show that conspiracy narrations are increasingly present in all venues. While language differs vastly between platforms, we observed a style convergence between Twitter and 4chan. The results show how more coded language veils the spread of racist and antisemitic content beyond the so-called dark platforms.

Listen

Auflistung Digitale Märkte und Öffentlichkeiten auf Plattformen nach Forschungsgruppen "Dynamiken der digitalen Mobilisierung"

Treffer pro Seite

Sortieroptionen