Auflistung nach Forschungsgruppen "Digitalisierung und transnationale Öffentlichkeit"

Gerade angezeigt 1 - 20 von 25
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    Anti‐elitism in the European Radical Right in Comparative Perspective
    (2023) Vaughan, Michael; Heft, Annett
    To better understand the communication of anti-elitism in contemporary politics, this study conceptually differentiates between specific anti-elitism geared toward specific, materially powerful elites (‘Angela Merkel’) and general anti-elitism referencing broader discursive constructs (‘the elite’). The study analyses the online communications of radical right parties in the 2019 European Parliament elections from six countries (Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Poland and Sweden). This more fine-grained analysis of anti-elitism highlights some areas of transnational convergence, such as a tendency to focus on specific political elites, rather than other sectors such as the media or discursive constructs. The findings also reveal stratification according to parties’ position in national power structures: opposition parties tend to target national-level elites while governing parties focus on the European level. The findings highlight that anti-elitism is used in a highly instrumental way, and help us to better understand the intersection between anti-elitism and the multilevel politics of EP elections.
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    Attributing Coordinated Social Media Manipulation: A Theoretical Model and Typology.
    (2025) Thiele, Daniel; Milzner, Miriam; Gong, Baoning; Pfetsch, Barbara; Heft, Annett
    Social media are key arenas for public opinion formation, but are susceptible to coordinated social media manipulation (CSMM), that is, the orchestrated activity of multiple accounts to increase content visibility and deceive audiences. Despite advances in detecting and characterizing CSMM, the attribution problem—identifying the principals behind CSMM campaigns—has received little scholarly attention. In this article, we address this gap by synthesizing existing research and developing a theoretical model for understanding CSMM. We propose a consolidated definition of CSMM, identify its key observable and hidden characteristics, and present a rational choice model for inferring principals’ strategic decisions from campaign features. In addition, we present a typology of CSMM campaigns, linking variations in scale, elaborateness, and disguise to principals’ resources, stakes, and influence strategies. Our contribution provides researchers with conceptual and heuristic tools for attribution and invites interdisciplinary and comparative research on CSMM campaigns.
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    BRAT Rapid Annotation Tool
    (2022) Strippel, Christian; Laugwitz, Laura; Paasch-Colberg, Sünje; Esau, Katharina; Heft, Annett
    In the context of interdisciplinary collaboration, especially with colleagues from computer science, communication and media research has for some time been confronted with a wide range of research software with which it has had little prior experience. In addition to programming languages such as Python or R, these include specific tools for text analysis that represent an alternative to previous variants of computer-assisted content analysis. With the brat rapid annotation tool (BRAT) we present such an alternative in this paper and review it against the background of our experience in using it. BRAT is a web-based open-source text annotation tool that was developed by an international team of computer scientists about ten years ago. The article introduces the tool and its most important features, presents examples for its use in qualitative and quantitative content analyses on the basis of three case studies, and finally evaluates it with regard to potentials and difficulties for the field.
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    Chat groups as local civic infrastructure: A case study of “Solidary neighborhood help” Telegram groups during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany
    (2025) Pasitselska, Olga; Buehling, Kilian; Gagrčin, Emilija
    Messaging groups are emerging as “meso-spaces”—digital environments that enable sustained dialogue and collective action through their distinct affordances. We examine how such spaces facilitate civic self-organization through their hybrid online/offline, public/private, and local/global dynamics and how they function as local civic infrastructure during times of crisis. Using a mixed-methods analytical approach, we examined 47 public Telegram groups from Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identified a fundamental tension between political discussion and practical help in these spaces, resolvable through active horizontal participation (including norm negotiation and self-moderation), or strict vertical moderation. Additional challenges included a lack of access to vulnerable groups and limited outreach to local civil society actors, both of which hindered group activity and structural connections within local civic infrastructure. Despite these challenges, our study highlights the potential of local chat groups for self-organization, albeit primarily among privileged urban individuals. We discuss the implications for democratic theory and practice.
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    Conditions to Strengthen Future Cross-Border Journalism
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2020) Heft, Annett
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    Decoding revision mechanisms in Wikipedia: Collaboration, moderation, and collectivities
    (Sage, 2025) Zhang, Xixuan
    Research on knowledge collaboration in Wikipedia has predominately focused on metadata at the article level or editor-centric analyses, often overlooking the complexities of knowledge collaboration and its contextual dependencies. This study takes a novel, fine-grained approach to investigating revision mechanisms in Wikipedia’s knowledge collaboration. By considering modified sentences as carriers of collective knowledge and spaces in which epistemic power is negotiated, it reconstructs their revision sequences and examines how editorial, contextual, content, and temporal factors shape Wikipedia’s revision dynamics. A total of 140,593 revisions (by 48,643 editors) of 76,525 sentences in 537 Wikipedia articles related to climate change were analyzed using text mining, natural language processing, survival analysis, and meta-analysis. The findings expand our understanding of how epistemic power is negotiated through collective endeavors underlying bureaucratic rules and community moderation in Wikipedia.
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    Exploring the Facebook Networks of German Anti-Immigration Groups
    (University of Trento, 2020) Hoffmann, Matthias
    This dissertation investigates the role of digital media for contentious collective action. More precisely, it focuses on German anti-asylum-shelter (AAS) groups on Facebook and the way these organizations’ usage of platform affordances can be read from an adaptation of the framework of Modes of Coordination (MoC) of collective action. To do so, the thesis starts with an inquiry of the theoretical debate on the role of information and communication technology for social movements and collective action and highlights some misconceptions and discrepancies, especially on the role of formal organizations (chapter II). It argues to carefully explore the different interorganizational ties that form between AAS-groups and the networks that emerge from these in light of the two dimensions of resource exchange and boundary definition. After that, chapter III provides detailed accounts of case selection and data collection and of the research questions that structure the subsequent analyses. To answer these, chapter IV-i explores the temporal and spatial activity patterns of AAS-groups both on- and offline, finding a clear correspondence between the two. Chapter IV-ii uses topic modelling to explore the content of groups’ communication, identifying a narrative of the reasonable and peaceful in-group and a combination of criminal (asylum-seekers), treacherous (politicians) and lying (press) outgroups. This clearly debunks a narrative of centrist “concerned citizens” and shows the deeply racist and right-wing extremist nature of AAS activity. The third empirical part (chapter IV-iii) discusses five types of networks that emerge from groups’ activities and combines these into four different MoC. We can identify a prevalence of the organizational mode of coordination, that involves limited exchange in terms of both resource exchange and boundary definition. However, a small but dense network also emerges from those ties that are defined by the social movement mode. Exponential Random Graph Modelling shows that while spatial proximity is a key determinant for tie formation across all modes, the role of formal organizations (right-wing parties) must not be dismissed. In fact, it differs both by party and by MoC in question. Overall, as chapter V sums up, the dissertation proves the relevance of a relational perspective to the study of digitally mediated collective action in general, as well as of an adapted framework of MoC in particular.
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    From the fringes into mainstream politics. Intermediary networks and movement-party coordination of a global anti-immigration campaign in Germany
    (2022) Klinger, Ulrike; Lance Bennett, W.; Knüpfer, Curd; Martini, Franziska; Zhang, Xixuan
    Many liberal democracies have witnessed the rise of radical right parties and movements that threaten liberal values of tolerance and inclusion. Extremist movement factions may promote inflammatory ideas that engage broader publics, but party leaders face dilemmas of endorsing content from extremist origins. However, when that content is shared over larger intermediary networks of aligned supporters and media sites, it may become laundered or disconnected from its original sources so that parties can play it back as official communication. With a dynamic network analysis and various-time series analysis we tracked content flows from the German version of a global farright anti-immigration campaign across different media platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, and collections of far-right and mainstream media sites. The analysis shows how content from the small extremist Identitarian Movement spread over expanding networks of low-level activists of the Alternative for Germany party and far-right alternative media sites. That network bridging enabled party leadership to launder the source of the content and roll out its own version of the campaign. As a result, national attention became directed to extremist ideas.
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    How do news entrepreneurs view the future of their profession? Four theses on tomorrow’s journalism
    (2019) Keinert, Alexa; Heft, Annett; Dogruel, Leyla
    In view of fundamental transformations in the media landscape, the future of professional journalism is not only debated among communication scholars but also among journalists and media professionals. Relying on interviews with journalists and founders of German news start-ups, we contribute to this debate and present news entrepreneurs’ perceptions on (1) the core functions of journalism in the future and (2) trends regarding journalism concepts, organisational forms, and revenue models of professional journalism. Based on our findings, four trends can be identified: (1) Professional journalism must focus on comprehensively investigated ›good stories‹. (2) The illusion of objective journalism is replaced by journalism with attitude. (3) Collaboration is the future organisational form in journalism. (4) The funding of professional journalism must increasingly come from civil society.
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    How Right-Wing Alternative News Sites in the U.S. Depict Antifa
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2020) Knüpfer, Curd
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    LGDE: Local Graph-based Dictionary Expansion
    (2025) Schindler, Juni; Jha, Sneha; Zhang, Xixuan; Buehling, Kilian; Heft, Annett; Barahona, Mauricio
    We present Local Graph-based Dictionary Expansion (LGDE), a method for data-driven discovery of the semantic neighbourhood of words using tools from manifold learning and network science. At the heart of LGDE lies the creation of a word similarity graph from the geometry of word embeddings followed by local community detection based on graph diffusion. The diffusion in the local graph manifold allows the exploration of the complex nonlinear geometry of word embeddings to capture word similarities based on paths of semantic association, over and above direct pairwise similarities. Exploiting such semantic neighbourhoods enables the expansion of dictionaries of pre-selected keywords, an important step for tasks in information retrieval, such as database queries and online data collection. We validate LGDE on two user-generated English-language corpora and show that LGDE enriches the list of keywords with improved performance relative to methods based on direct word similarities or co-occurrences. We further demonstrate our method through a real-world use case from communication science, where LGDE is evaluated quantitatively on the expansion of a conspiracy-related dictionary from online data collected and analysed by domain experts. Our empirical results and expert user assessment indicate that LGDE expands the seed dictionary with more useful keywords due to the manifold-learning-based similarity network.
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    Measuring the diffusion of conspiracy theories in digital information ecologies
    (2022) Heft, Annett; Bühling, Kilian
    Digital platforms and media are fertile breeding grounds for disinformation and conspirational views. They provide a variety of communication venues for a mixed set of actors and foster the diffusion of content between actor groups, across platforms and media, and across languages and geographical spaces. Understanding those diffusion processes requires approaches to measure the prevalence and spread of communicative acts within and across digital platforms. Given the increasing access to digital data, computational methods provide new possibilities to capture this spread and do justice to the interrelated nature and hybridity of online communication. Against this background, the paper focuses on the spread of conspiracy theories in digital information ecologies. It provides a review of recent methodological approaches to measuring conspiracy-related content online regarding the (a) prevalence and (b) diffusion of conspiracy theories. To that end, the paper differentiates between social network analysis approaches and computational techniques of automated text classification. It further discusses how far these and related computational approaches could facilitate studying the diffusion of conspiracy theories across different actor types, languages, topics and platforms. In doing so, it takes the specific nature of online communication and challenges in the field of conspiracy-related content into account.
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    Migrating Counterpublics: German Far-Right Online Groups on Russian Social Media
    (2023) Voskresenskii, Vadim
    Due to censorship and deplatforming policies on big social media platforms, far-right users have been forced to migrate to other online platforms that provide them with safer spaces for communication. One of these platforms is the Russian social networking site VK. This research investigates the German political environment on VK, which predominantly comprises online groups supporting far-right views. The analysis of users’ activity in the online groups showed that VK functions as an alternative platform and is not used for outward-oriented goals. Looking at the activities on VK in terms of the theory of sustainability practices, we claim that one of the most critical functions of VK is archiving content. This practice ensures the preservation of accumulated narratives in the case of complete deplatforming on a mainstream platform. We found that people who use VK for communication form two different thematic clusters: The first focuses on German domestic issues, and the second focuses on transnational conspiracy theories.
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    Mobilization and support structures in radical right party networks. Digital political communication ecologies in the 2019 European parliament elections
    (2022) Heft, Annett; Reinhardt, Susanne; Pfetsch, Barbara
    The 2019 European Parliament elections seemingly fostered concerted political action among radical right parties (RRPs) to fortify their positions and mobilize publics on a pan-European scale. Digital platforms provide central infrastructure for networks among political actors and user interactions on the ground. Our study, therefore, investigates the intra- and transnational networking on Twitter established by RRPs’ strategic communication and user interactions. To understand how distinct political and media-related opportunity structures align with different intensities, types, and meanings of digital connections, we investigate the salience, actor types, and geographical scopes as well as the functions of digital connections within and across Twitter networks in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Sweden during the EP election campaigns. Our results indicate the influence of parties’ structural power position on networked communication: The ecologies around RRPs in government reflect their integration in national discourses and competition. The networks of RRPs in opposition display a self-referential campaign ecology for the promotion and distribution of candidates, content, and positions. Transnationality in these networks is structured by EU-level collaboration and driven by civil society and political entrepreneurs, who appear keener to mobilize across borders.
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    Re-Defining Borders Online: Russia’s Strategic Narrative on Internet Sovereignty
    (2021) Litvinenko, Anna
    Over the past decades, internet governance has developed in a tug‐of‐war between the democratic, transnational nature of the web, and attempts by national governments to put cyberspace under control. Recently, the idea of digital sovereignty has started to increasingly gain more supporters among nation states. This article is a case study on the Russian concept of a “sovereign internet.” In 2019, the so‐called law on sustainable internet marked a new milestone in the development of RuNet. Drawing on document analysis and expert interviews, I reconstruct Russia’s strategic narrative on internet sovereignty and its evolution over time. I identify the main factors that have shaped the Russian concept of sovereignty, including domestic politics, the economy, international relations, and the historical trajectory of the Russian segment of the internet. The article places the Russian case in a global context and discusses the importance of strategic narratives of digital sovereignty for the future of internet governance
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    Resilience of Public Spheres in a Global Health Crisis
    (Weizenbaum Institute, 2020) Trenz, Hans-Jörg; Heft, Annett; Vaughan, Michael; Pfetsch, Barbara
    The Covid-19 pandemic disrupted “normal” modes of public sphere functioning and activated an experimental mode of coping, reinventing forms of publicness and communicative exchanges. We conceptualize the social responses triggered by the crisis as particular forms of public sphere resilience and assess the role of digitalisation and digital spaces in the emergence of distinct modes and dynamics of resilience. Four areas of enhanced public sphere experimentation are the basis of our conceptualisation: political consumerism, digital modes of solidarity, political protest mobilisation, and news consumption. We discuss overarching features of public sphere resilience across societal sub-spheres and highlight the dynamics and hybridities which structure the emerging public spaces. Resilience practices are accompanied by dynamics of politicisation and depoliticisation coupled with shifting boundaries of publicness and privateness. Our observations likewise reveal the dynamic interplay between resilience and resistance.
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    Spaces, Places, and Geographies of Public Spheres. Exploring Dimensions of the Spatial Turn
    (2021) Waldherr, Annie; Klinger, Ulrike; Pfetsch, Barbara
    For decades, scholars have been calling out a spatial turn in media and communication studies. Yet, in public sphere research, spatial concepts such as space and place have mainly been used metaphorically. In recent years, the abundance of digital trace data offers new opportunities to locate communicative interactions, sparking new interest in the spatial turn in media and communication and opening up new perspectives on spaces and places also within public sphere research. Digital location data enables one to: study the places and spaces in which (semi-)public communication is embedded; uncover geographical inequalities between countries, regions, cities, and peripheries; and highlight the local contexts of public spheres. This thematic issue gathers some of these endeavors in one place, bringing together conceptual, methodological, and empirical contributions that spell out the spatiality of public spheres in detail and combine the analysis of spaces, places, and geographies with long-standing concepts of public sphere research.
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    Topographies of Local Public Spheres on Social Media: The Scope of Issues and Interactions
    (2021) Pfetsch, Barbara; Maier, Daniel; Stoltenberg, Daniela; Waldherr, Annie; Kligler-Vilenchik, Neta; de Vries Kedem, Maya
    Following calls for a spatial turn in communication studies, we investigate the reach and topography of Twitter communication in two case studies of Berlin and Jerusalem. We theorize on the spatial dimensions of social media communication and their potential to establish a public sphere that can reach from the local to the global level. Empirically, we investigate the scope of Twitter communication of local users in Berlin and Jerusalem and ask to what degree their interactions and issues indicate a local public sphere or extend beyond the local level. We use a combination of topic modeling and a novel localization index to explore the spatial dimensions of the two Twitterspheres. Our data point to a considerable share of locally rooted conversations, but the majority of communication reaches beyond the local. At the intersection of interactions and issues, we uncover complex, semilocal configurations of public communication.
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    Toward a Transnational Information Ecology on the Right? Hyperlink Networking among Right-Wing Digital News Sites in Europe and the United States
    (2021) Heft, Annett; Knüpfer, Curd; Reinhardt, Susanne; Mayerhöffer, Eva
    The recent rise of a more transnationally networked political right across Europe and the United States has been accompanied by an emerging alternative digital news infrastructure through which information circulates and shared epistemologies are established. This paper examines the extent to which digital news sites on the right are interconnected within and across countries. It further explores which additional sites serve as transnationally shared reference points of such news ecology on a transnational scale. To do so, we investigate hyperlink networks between alternative right-wing online news sites (RNS) in six western democracies (Austria, Germany, United States, United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden). Our analysis draws on hyperlink data harvested from 65 RNS for three months in 2018. The results show that RNS do establish interlinked alternative right-wing news ecologies, as they connect to likeminded RNS within and across borders. Furthermore, we see substantial variation across countries, where RNS from countries with less established alternative right-wing news infrastructure are more likely to link transnationally to RNS. The United States represents an outlier in that it features the largest and domestically most integrated network of RNS, while U.S. sites function as hubs for transnational connections from European RNS. Apart from connections between RNS, we find that legacy news media are crucial transnationally shared reference points. We conclude that rather than presenting an insulated, alternative sphere, the emerging digital news ecology on the right seeks to link up to the broader information environment across borders.