Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference

Democracy in Flux:
Order, Dynamics and Voices in
Digital Public Spheres
July 2021
Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked
Society – The German Internet InstituteProceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021
Democracy in Flux: Order, Dynamics andVoices in Digital Public Spheres
Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society –The German Internet InstituteProceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

DOI 10.34669/wi.cp/3.24 \ ISSN 2510-7666
EDITORS: The Managing Board members of the Weizenbaum-Institut e.V.
Prof. Dr. Christoph Neuberger
Prof. Dr. Sascha Friesike
Prof. Dr. Martin Krzywdzinski
Dr. Karin-Irene Eiermann
Hardenbergstraße 32 \ 10623 Berlin \ Tel.: +49 30 700141-001
info@weizenbaum-institut.de \ www.weizenbaum-institut.de
TYPESETTING: Roland Toth, M.A.
COPYRIGHT: This series is available open access and is licensed under
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY_4.0): https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/
WEIZENBAUM INSTITUTE: The Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society –The German Internet Institute is a joint project funded by the Federal
Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). It conducts interdisciplinary andbasic research on the changes in society caused by digitalisation and develops options for ­shaping politics, business and civil society.
This work has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Researchof Germany (BMBF) (grant no.: 16DII121, 16DII122, 16DII123, 16DII124,
16DII125, 16DII126, 16DII127, 16DII128 – “Deutsches Internet-Institut”).

Table of Contents
Bayer, Judit
The Double Harm Caused by Political Micro-Targeting

6

Pierri, Paola
Who Can Still Afford to do Digital Activism? Exploring the material
conditions of online mobilisation

10

Mutu, Adriana
Media Literacy and the Protection of Minors in the Digital Age:Intermediary initiatives during the transposition of the AVMS
Directive in Spain

14

Burgers, Tobias; Farber, David
Public Opinion and its Influence on Cyber Crisis Decision-Making
Processes

18

Fichtner, Laura
Moderating the Regulators/Regulating the Moderators: NetzDG andonline content moderation in Germany

21

Peisker, Johannes
What is a Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere? Someskeptical remarks on the discourse of digitality

25

Friess, Dennis
Collective Civic Engagement and Civic Counter Publics: Theoreticalreflections upon a new phenomenon

30

Maier, Daniel; Porten-Cheé, Pablo; Kunst, Marlene
The Emergence and Persistence of Online Civic Intervention as a
Discourse Norm: A network simulation model

37

Schäfer, Hilmar
Digital Practices: Whose voices are we hearing?

39

Yan, Pu; Schroeder, Ralph
Drifting Away From the Mainstream: Media attention and the politics
of hyperpartisan news websites

42

Bodrunova, Svetlana S.; Litvinenko, Anna; Blekanov, Ivan
Incivility and Political Dissent: Multiple roles of aggressive speech incomments on Russian YouTube

45

Schäfer, Andreas; Gardner, Beth Gharrity
Between Anarchy and Order: Digital campaigning heuristics inhybrid media environments49

Bene, Márton; Ceron, Andrea; Fenoll, Vicente; Haßler, Jörg; Kruschinski, Simon;
Larsson, Anders Olof; Magin, Melanie; Schlosser, Katharina; Wurst, AnnaKatharina; Lilleker, Darren; Maurer, PeterEngaging Users Through Information or Critique? “Likes” and“shares” for parties on Facebook during the 2019 European Election
52
campaign
Nijmeijer, Rolf; Schünemann, Wolf; König, Tim
Following the Beaten Track: A sociology of knowledge perspective on
disinformation and its effects on democratic discourse

57

Neyer, Jürgen; Worschech, Susann; König, Tim
Fostering Inclusion Online: Can online instruments compensate theelitist bias of representative democracy?

61

Góralska, Magdalena
For Health of The Nation, Unite Online: Medical controversies, civil
disobedience and the future of democracy in the light of expert
authority crisis

64

Kaesling, Katharina
The Making of Citizens: Democracy and children’s rights in digital
spheres69

Lichtenstein, Dennis; Herbers, Martin R.; Bause, Halina
The New Face(s) of News: Journalistic intermediaries in the YouTube
universe

74

Fertmann, Martin; Kettemann, Matthias C.
Intermediaries vs. States or Intermediaries and States: Democracy inthe post-intermediation age

78

Borucki, Isabelle; Ziegler, Stine
Digital Activists: The networking society as a democratic reality

82

Bormann, Marike; Heinbach, Dominique; Ziegele, Marc
“Can we please stop yelling at each other just because it’s theInternet?” Comparing incivility perceptions of community managers,
users, and activists in online comment sections

86

Mahapatra, Sangeeta; Garimella, Kiran
Digital Public Activism and the Redefinition of Citizenship: The
movement against the citizenship (amendment) act of India

91

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

The Double Harm Caused by Political Micro-Targeting
Bayer, Judit
Associate Professor, Budapest Business School
Budapest, Hungary
Schumann Fellow, Institute of Information, Telecommunication and Media Law, University of Münster
Münster, Germany
bayerj@uni-muenster.de

KEYWORDS
political micro-targeting; data-driven; political campaign; human rights; freedom of expression; freedom of information, democratic process; public discourse.

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.1

6

1

INTRODUCTION

The sophisticated psychological and technological targeting methods which had been developed by
the commercial advertising industry has been leveraged by the political parties in recent elections(Papakyriakopoulos, Hegelich, Shahrezaye, & Serrano, 2018; Bodó, Helberger, & de Vreese, 2017;
Chester & Montgomery, 2017, EDPS 2018: 11).
But the impact of commercial advertising is different from that of political advertising: first, politicalcompetition culminates in one common decision passed by the political community, which affects
each member of that polity, whereas commercial decisions are individually made, and effect mainly
the same individual. Second, commercial decisions are more or less based on rational consideration,
but political preferences are to a large extent emotional (Weir, 2019). It has been observed that voters’
preference for their political candidate is not influenced by debunking what their favourite has said
(Swire at al. 2017). This is a signal of the audience’s vulnerability in the context of political manipulation: people of all political beliefs are more prone to bias, and less likely to recognise bias consistent
with their political belief (Ditto et al., 2018).
The democratic deliberative process should ideally be based on an open public discourse (Habermas,
1996), a free exchange of thoughts on the marketplace of ideas (Mill, 1863). According to sometheories, the citizenry ought to develop a general will (volonté du peuple, Rousseau, 1789, Dunning,1909). In any case, possessing a common information basis appears necessary for a society to function, to pass and accept political decisions. “In a well-functioning democracy, people do not live in[an] echo chamber or information cocoons” (Sunstein, 2007).
Political micro-targeting shares selected messages only with a carefully tailored audience. The basisof selection are the personal data of the users, traces that they leave while browsing, posting, sharing
and liking.

2

VIOLATION OF THE RIGHT TO INFORMATIONThis paper argues that beyond violating privacy rights of the targeted users, micro-targeted political
advertising robs non-targeted voters of the information which is communicated to the targeted
voters. This violates their right to information, which is the counterpart of freedom of expression,
as expressed by Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights. Theorists like Dworkin,
Mill, Baker, Barendt, Meiklejohn have emphasized that democratic formation of the public's political
will should be based on common discussion of public matters. Expressions, especially political expressions are protected, but speech which reduces diversity and access to information, can be legitimately restricted on the basis of the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence.
Data-driven political campaigns lead to a collision of freedom of political expression and the right toinformation. Paradoxically, the balancing should be made not between two fundamental rights, but
the two sides of the same fundamental right. Political expressions are the most highly protected formsof expression, while access to information, and the public informational landscape as such, is also a
cornerstone of the democratic system.
An important aspect of the discussion is, whether micro-targeting can be used for “beneficial” purposes. Indeed, not all uses are manipulative, malicious uses. First, even beneficial purposed applications of this method fragment the public information landscape. However, there may be situations
7

when this fragmentation is desired for the social good. For political purposes, micro-targeted political
advertising could provide detailed information in special areas, to interested voters. For purposes of
education, it could apply micro-targeted “social purpose advertisements” as ‘nudges’. For example,
addressing persons with certain characteristics to inform them about healthy habits, information literacy, etc. If micro-targeted political – and commercial – advertising is liberally allowed (as it currently is), then nudges are also applicable. Where is the limit of intrusion to personal matters, andwhat should be the safeguards?

3

PLATFORM POLICIES

Since 2019, giant social media platforms developed their policy regarding political ads. Twitter opted
for completely rejecting political ads, while Facebook set transparency rules and created an ad repository. However, this repository proved insufficient to provide information about targeting criteria, andwhether vulnerabilities have been exploited (Panoptykon, 2020, Edelson, Lauinger & McCoy, 2020),
and did not cooperate with researchers adequately to ensure transparency (Forbes, 2020). ERGA’smonitoring found that the databases required further development in order to provide the tools anddata necessary to ensure the required level of transparency (ERGA, 2019).
The draft European regulatory action 'Digital Services Act' provides that the repository should also
contain the main parameters of microtargeting and other relevant data (Article 30, DSA), as well as
access to such data (Article 31) – but with significant exceptions (Section 6. Article 31).
The paper's novelty lies in translating the violation of individual rights into collective rights – theright to information and a fair political campaign. Based on a legal analysis of fundamental rights,
and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, it makes a statement at the intersection ofpolitical theory and communication theory.
The topic is likely to raise discussion for some reasons. First, because the freedom of political expression is a very strong fundamental political right, and its restriction – even if it would affect only
certain types of transmission – is a delicate issue. Moreover, the class which is the most affected,
major political parties, are counter-interested, as they would benefit from this practice, which can bebest leveraged by financially strong actors. Second, there is a current dispute around the concept offragmentation of the public sphere, and the interpretation of its consequences.

4

REFERENCES
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Bodó, B., Helberger, N., & de Vreese, C. H. (2017, December 31). Political micro-targeting: A Manchurian
candidate or just a dark horse? Internet Policy Review.
Chester, J., & Montgomery, K. (2017, December 31). The role of digital marketing in political campaigns. Internet Policy Review.
Ditto, P. H., Liu, B. S., Clark, C. J., Wojcik, S. P., Chen, E. E., Grady, R. H., Celniker, J. B., & Zinger, J. F.
(2019). At Least Bias Is Bipartisan: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Partisan Bias in Liberals and Conservatives. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(2), 273–291. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617746796
Dunning. Wm. A. (1909). The Political Theories of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Political Science Quarterly, 24(3), 377408. doi:10.2307/2140885
Edelson, L., Lauinger, T., & McCoy, D. (2020). A security analysis of the facebook ad library. In Proceedings- 2020 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2020 (pp. 661-678). [9152626] (Proceedings - IEEE
Symposium on Security and Privacy; Vol. 2020-May). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
European Data Protection Supervisor (2018): EDPS Opinion on online manipulation and personal data.
Habermas, J. (1984). Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Volume 1 of The Theory of Communicative
Action, Boston: Beacon Press.
Mill, J. S. (1863). On Liberty. Boston.
89.

Panoptykon Foundation (2020) Submission in the consultations of the European Data Protection Board Guidelines 8/2020 on the targeting of social media users.
10. Papakyriakopoulos, O., Hegelich, S., Shahrezaye, M., & Serrano, J. C. (2018, Nov 20). Social media and microtargeting: Political data processing and the consequences for Germany. Big Data and Society, 5(2).
11. Sunstein, C. (2007). #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media. Princeton University Press.
12. Swire Briony, Berinsky Adam J., Lewandowsky Stephan and Ecker Ullrich K. H. (2017) Processing politicalmisinformation: comprehending the Trump phenomenon. R. Soc. open sci.4160802160802.
http://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160802
13. Weir, K. (2019) Politics is personal. Research by political psychologists helps to explain why we vote the way
we do – and is informing ways to improve democratic elections. APA, Vol. 50, No. 10. p. 44

9Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Who Can Still Afford to do Digital Activism?
Exploring the material conditions of online mobilisation

Pierri, Paola
London College of Communication
London, United Kingdom
p.pierri@lcc.arts.ac.uk

KEYWORDS
Social movements studies; digital activism; digital inequalities; feminist studies

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.2

10

1

INTRODUCTION

As digital activism is now considered a widespread form of activism, studies about its impact andtactics have expanded. Whilst majority of current research into this phenomenon (Treré, 2018; Bennett and Segerberg, 2012; Postill, 2012) have tended to analyse the impact of digital technologies on
action and activism (its nature and impact), this study adopts a different perspective as it will be exploring the role of organisations and organisational structures, focusing on internal processes andfunctioning of digital campaigning. Based on ethnographic observation and face-to-face interviews
with members of online campaigning organisations, the paper aims to present an updated study ofdigital organising and reflect on the initial findings about the role of women in the digital activist
labour.

2

RECOGNISING THE DIGITAL ACTIVISM LABOUR

Originally based on the so called ‘MoveOn model’, built around the structure of the famous US
online campaigning organisation, digital first campaigning has been often depicted as a form of ‘organising without organisations’ (Karpf, 2012). In this view, digital activism seems to appear as animmaterial phenomenon that happens almost spontaneously as a result of self-organising processes,
facilitated by the use of the Internet and amplified through social media.
Since the times of MoveOn, digital campaigning organisations have instead become increasingly
professionalised, as their role of intermediaries between activists and institutional political actors isincreasingly needed. As one member of staff from an online campaigning organisation once said tome: “the time when one could share a petition on social media and attract huge attention have sincelong go. We need to accept the fact that we might never have a campaign that gets viral. We need towork much harder and for less visibility.”. What this quote exemplifies is the awareness from those
who operate within these organisations that times have shifted, as the online space has become more
crowded, and more work and better infrastructures are needed in order to develop new tactics andcampaigns strategies that can mobilise people and have impact.
In her recent book studying a workers’ rights movement in North Carolina, Jen Schradie (2019) interestingly presents the finding that those groups who are better-resourced, have developed solid infrastructures, hierarchy of decision making, clear division of labour, are simply the most effective
and those who benefit the most from the use digital tools for activism. The reasons to forward what
Schradie calls the ‘digital activist bureaucracy’ are many, including to bring the attention back to
the material conditions of work and precarity, hierarchy and exclusion that many who work in thisfield have to face. For the purpose of the Weizenbaum conference I will focus on one key aspect,which is the conditions of women within the structures of digital labour, as this is very much a neglected area also for social movement research more broadly (Batliwala and Friedman, 2014).

3

FEMINISM AND DIGITAL ACTIVISM: A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP

Whilst some scholars (Tarrow 2011) initially identified feminist principles and values as being at
the core of new digital social movements, recently more critical perspectives on the current evolution of feminism in the digital space are emerging (Jouët, 2018; Fotopolou, 2016; Baer, 2016; Boler
et al 2014). Drawing on feminist studies of activism (Bhattacharjya et al. 2013) this paper argues
that inequalities can be built and perpetrated within social movements themselves, even when11

women are participants and women rights campaigns are prioritised. Moreover, the argument that
this paper aims to bring forward is that these inequalities could possibly even be exacerbated in timeof digital activism in at least two ways: 1) by introducing new forms of discriminations; 2) by creating an aggressive online environment against women.
On the first point, scholars of digital movements have for instance revealed discriminatory dynamics happening from within these movements, as women are relegated to forms of ‘connective labor’(Boler et al 2014), which are gender specific forms of invisible labour in the area of social media
and storytelling. These points deeply resonated in my interviews, as the women I spoke to all reflected on the male predominance in the Tech teams, and the difficulty of addressing the gender unbalance (in organisation that were otherwise predominantly made by women), as applications fortech roles were very rarely coming from women tech experts. One interviewee interestingly highlighted how members of the Tech team were not clarifying important tech functionalities or avoiding to explain the technology used for specific tactics, as in their own words those women not in the
Tech team “don’t need to understand that.” in this way affirming a sort of epistemic exclusion.
Aristea Fotopolou (2016) also highlighted how feminist organisations experience new forms of exclusion of access to the digital networks, based on skills, resources and age. These findings are confirmed in the research from Josiane Jouët (2018) carries out in France, which reflects on thechanges that feminist online groups have witnessed regarding the biographies of the women involved and the style of leadership and organizing: “(…) activists are mainly young, in their latetwenty or thirties (..), belong to the middle or upper-low classes, and many have reached at least
the first level of higher education” (Jouët, 2018). The young women that Jouët interviewed were
fully aware of the need to develop very good communication and digital skills, also in order toavoid depending on male tech-experts. As a consequence of these shifts in profiles, interests andknowledge of these young women activists, the study reveals how new professional figures andways of working have emerged in this area. These new ‘leaders’ in fact often belong to the media
sphere and are communication and digital experts.
On the second point, it emerged from my research that whilst on one hand women are enabled byonline activism to take action without “having to take the streets”, still online activism is not protecting them from attacks and violence. Scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser has for instance recently highlighted (2018) how at the same time when girls are encouraged to play a central role in the new digital world, and as forms of hashtag feminism seem to have been so successful, there is an increasein online misogynistic movements which undermine positive change from happening. Her analysis
points to the perverse effect of the ‘economy of visibility’, as women activists are keen to be visible
and develop strategies to maximise their exposure (Jouët, 2018), they (perhaps) inadvertently end
up feeding the same algorithmic logic that is giving visibility to the increased misogynism online.
The implications of digital forms of activism on feminist movements are multiple and complex to
explore. Even those authors (Baer, 2016 and others) who recognise the great potential that digitalplatforms have for disseminating feminist ideas transnationally, do in fact raise important questions
regarding how digital activism has been impacting feminist protest culture and the advancement offeminist values in deeper ways. This paper aims to provide an initial contribution in this area andopen a debate, which is currently missing within the wider digital activism scholarship.

12

4

REFERENCES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
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Baer, H. (2016) Redoing feminism: digital activism, body politics, and neoliberalism, Feminist Media Studies,
16:1, 17-34, DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2015.1093070
Banet-Weiser, S. (2018) Empowered. Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, London, Duke University
Press
Batliwala, S. and Friedman, M. (2014) Achieving Transformative Feminist Leadership A Toolkit for Organisations and Movements, India – New York, CREA.
Bennett, L. and Segerberg, A. (2012). The Logic of Connective Action, Information Communication and Society 15(5): 739-768
Bhattacharjya, M., Birchall, J., Caro, P., et al. (2013) Why gender matters in activism: feminism and social
justice movements, in Gender & Development 21(2), 277–293.
Bleeker, J. and Nova, N. (2009) A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing, The
Architectural League of New York http://www.situatedtechnologies.net
Boler, M., Macdonald, A., Nitsou, C. and Harris, A. (2014) Connective labor and social media: Womens’s
roles in the ‘leaderless’ Occupy Movement, in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into NewMedia Technologies 1–23.

8.

Duffy, B. E. (2017) (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work,
New Haven, Yale University Press

9.

Fotopoulou, A. (2016) Digital and networked by default? Women’s organisations and the social imaginary of
networked feminism, in new media & society 18 – 6, 989 –1005

10. Jouët, Josiane (2018). “Digital Feminism: Questioning the Renewal of Activism,” Journal of Research in Gender Studies 8(1): 133–157
11. Karpf, D. (2017) Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy, Oxford University Press
12. Karpf, D. (2012) The MoveOn Effect, The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy, Oxford University Press
13. Postill, J. (2012) Digital politics and political engagement. In H. Horst and D. Miller (eds) Digital Anthropology. Oxford: Berg
14. Schradie, J. (2019) The Revolution that wasn’t. How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives, Harvard University Press
15. Treré, E. (2018). From digital activism to algorithmic resistance. In: Meikle, G. ed. The Routledge Companion
to Media and Activism, Routledge Media and Cultural Studies Companions, London and New York:
Routledge, pp. 367-375.
16. Tarrow S (2011) Why Occupy Wall Street is not the tea party of the left, in Foreign Affairs (Published by theCouncil on Foreign Relations). Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-america/2011-1010/why-occupy-wall-street-not-tea-party-left (accessed April 2017)13

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Media Literacy and the Protection of
Minors in the Digital Age
Intermediary initiatives during the transposition of the AVMS
Directive in Spain

Mutu, Adriana
Departamento de Comunicación
Universitat Abat Oliba CEU
Barcelona, Spain
amutu@uao.es

KEYWORDSAVMSD; Spain; intermediaries

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.3

14The Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) was adopted on 28 November 2018 and published in the Official Journal of the European Union (EU). The consolidated text of came into force
on December 19, 2018. The revised AVMSD aims to adapt to the new digital media ecosystem, market developments and technological advances, and applies to broadcasters, video-on-demand andvideo-sharing platforms. It aims to ensure enhanced protection of minors against harmful content,
improved accessibility of audiovisual communications for persons with disabilities, redefined limitsof commercial communications, promotion of European works on video-on-demand platforms’ catalogues, self-regulatory initiatives, and strengthened independence of national media regulatory authorities (Mutu, 2018).
In the light of these legal changes, this study aims to discuss the regulatory responses and initiatives
undertaken by relevant public authorities and intermediaries during the transposition of the AVMSD
into Spanish domestic law. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the activities undertaken by the competent state and regional media regulatory authorities and various stakeholders (defined as regulatoryintermediaries) in relation to the amendments of the AVMSD aiming at strengthening the protectionof minors and viewers in general from potentially harmful and prejudicial content on linear audiovisual programmes, video-sharing platforms, and social networks. As the study shows, intermediaries
played an important role in the elaboration of the Spanish Draft General Law on Audiovisual Media(LGCA) by providing information, issuing statements, positions or taken other initiatives regarding
the transposition of the AVMSD.
Stakeholders situated outside the public regulatory arrangement are defined in prior research as regulatory intermediaries or meta-regulators (Havinga & Verbruggen, 2017; Levi-Faur & Starobin,
2014; Abbott et al. 2017). Recent academic work advanced theoretical models to explain the role
played by intermediaries (Graeme & Renckens, 2017; Jordana, 2017; Van der, Heijden, 2017), including the R (regulator) → I (intermediary) → T (target) basic model. R represents the regulatorswith authority to regulate the target T. The intermediary is defined ‘as any actor that acts directly or
indirectly in conjunction with a regulator to affect the behavior of a target. (…) Its role can be formal
or informal; its participation can be driven by functional or power considerations; and it can serve
public or private interests’ (Abbott et al., 2017: 9). Intermediaries ‘can be facilitators and mediators,
enhancing trust and strengthening ‘regulatory dialogues’ between regulators and targets, and helping
them to collaborate in improving the effectiveness of regulation while lowering its costs and adverse
implications’ (Abbott et al., 2017: 17-18). The role played by stakeholders/intermediaries in audiovisual media regulation can be best discussed in relation to the rise of regulatory pressure on industrydriven actors including internet intermediaries such as search engines (Google), video-sharing platforms (YouTube) and social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) that were given editorial
duties and responsibilities under the AVMSD. ‘Meta-regulators’ are entrusted with self-regulatory
decision-making power in regulating ‘the online media content concerning hate speech, protection ofminors, viral spreading of fake news on social media and the fight against copyright infringement onvideo-sharing platforms’ (Rozgonyi, 2018: 18). Under the revised AVMSD, platform providers are
set to become co-regulatory guardians of the public interest, entrusted with editorial decisions ‘madeby automated or artificially intelligent algorithmic systems’ (Rozgonyi, 2018: 22).
This case-study analysis based on a qualitative longitudinal design sheds light on the Spanish transposition stages of the AVMSD after the date of entering into force up to the transposition deadline on
September 19, 2020. Data is taken from multiple publicly available sources such as central
15

government information, ministerial data, and regional agencies. As of today, the transposition of the
AVMSD in the Spanish legislation is ongoing. State audiovisual authorities with jurisdiction overaudiovisual policy and responsible for the supervision of video-sharing platforms (the Ministry of
Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation and the National Authority for Markets and Competition), and regional authorities (the Audiovisual Council of Catalonia and the Audiovisual Council ofAndalusia) have initiated various formal procedures, including public consultations and public hearings. Participation was sought from stakeholders in the industry, digital platforms, advertisers, agencies, regulators, consumers and other experts and agents interested in the sector. The input gatheredprior to the preparation of the draft General Law on Audiovisual Media was classified into thematic
areas (Legislative Impact Analysis Report for the LGCA 2020: 42) and addressed, among others, theamendments to the AVMSD on accessibility, media literacy, VSPs, protection of minors and thegeneral public from harmful or inappropriate content. The thematic areas ‘video-sharing platform
services and ‘protection of minors and the general public’ received 37 and 36 responses out of 60
contributions. The main issues raised were related to the application of audiovisual regulations to newmedia and new forms of consuming audiovisual services, the criteria for rating content by age, theuse of descriptors reporting content that is harmful to children and information on screen by all typesof service providers, parental control mechanisms and age verification systems for services provided
over the internet, enhanced protection schedules, and the review/strengthening of the penalty system(Legislative Impact Analysis Report for the LGCA 2020: 43).
Results show that various initiatives were undertaken with the aim to reinforce the protection of minors and viewers in general. As an example, the initiatives undertaken by the Audiovisual Council of
Catalonia (CAC) include: the launch of the Platform for Media Education aiming at promoting digital
media literacy; the signed cooperation agreement with various medical associations and colleges ofphysicians aiming at combating fake news related to health issues and promoting research into theeffects of online gambling and gambling advertisements. The ‘#AMiNoMenganyen’(#theycantfoolme) campaign was launched by the CAC, the Catalan Broadcasting Corporation and‘la Caixa’ Social Welfare Center aiming at promoting critical thinking, a responsible usage of technology, news information and social networks, and at warning about the dangers of cyberbullying,fake news, and threats to digital privacy. In addition, in May 2019 the Audiovisual Council of Catalonia1 asked for the withdrawal of 12 videos from YouTube that featured cybercontrol in teen dating.
YouTube responded to the request and withdrew 11 of the 12 videos.
Various actions and initiatives were also undertaken by stakeholders including civil society organizations, NGO’s, academia, news media outlets, industry associations and other public interest groups,
regarding the promotion of media literacy, the protection of minors on the internet, the protection ofchildren and youth exposed to online gambling and subliminal advertising etc.
To sum up, the analysis reveals that Spanish domestic authorities and intermediaries have been successful in framing the main issues related to the revised Audiovisual Directive and that, consequently,
various initiatives and actions have emerged. Further research is needed to evaluate the transposition
and implementation process.

1

The press releases are available at https://www.cac.cat/es/actualitat/cac-pide-la-retirada-12-videos-youtube-que-justifican-cibercontrol-las-mujeres-ambito-la.
16REFERENCES

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Abbott, K. W., Levi-Faur, D., Snidal, D. (2017). Theorizing Regulatory Intermediaries: The RIT Model. The
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Graeme, A., Renckens, S. (2017). Rule-making feedbacks through intermediation and evaluation in transnational
private governance. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 670, 93-111.

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Havinga, T., Verbruggen, P. (2017). Understanding Complex Governance Relationships in Food Safety Regulation: The RIT Model as a Theoretical Lens. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, 670(1), 58–77.

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Jordana, J. (2017). Transgovernmental networks as regulatory intermediaries: horizontal collaboration and therealities of soft power. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 670(1), 245-262.

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Levi-Faur, D., Starobin, S. M. (2014). Transnational politics and policy: From two-way to three-way interactions. Jerusalem Papers in Regulation and Governance, 62, 2–38.

6.

Mutu, A. (2018). The regulatory independence of audiovisual media regulators: A cross-national comparative
analysis. European Journal of Communication, 33(6), 619-638.

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Rozgonyi, K. (2018). A New Model for Media Regulation. InterMEDIA, 46(1), 18-23.

8.

Spanish Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation. State Secretariat for Telecommunications
and Digital Infrastructure (2020). Legislative Impact Analysis Report for the Draft General Law on Audiovisual
Media.

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Van der, Heijden J. (2017). Brighter and darker sides of intermediation: Target-oriented and self-interested intermediaries in the regulatory governance of buildings. The Annals of the American Academy of Political andSocial Science, 670(1), 207-224.

17

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Public Opinion and its Influence on Cyber Crisis
Decision-Making Processes
Burgers, Tobias
Cyber Civilization Research Center,
Keio University
Tokyo, Japan
burgers@keio.jp

Farber, David
Cyber Civilization Research Center,
Keio University
Tokyo, Japanfarber@keio.jp

KEYWORDS
Cyber Conflict; Public Opinion; Society-centric Conflict

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.4

18

Cyber incidents have undergone an escalatory trajectory in recent years. In the quantitative dimension, we have noticed an increase in cyber-attacks. Meanwhile, the qualitative impact of cyber-attacks has increased. It is not solely a game of information theft anymore: Actors are using cybermeans to destroy targets in the digital realm and increasingly the physical realm in particular targets
that are part of critical civilian infrastructures, such as electronic grids, dams, and harbors (Burgers
and Farber, 2021). We observe the rise of what we refer to as societal-level cyber-attacks: Cyberattacks, targeting critical civilian infrastructure, whose impact is foremost noticed by civilians andwhich the blur lines between the civilian and military domain. This is part of a larger developmentin which the civilian domain is becoming increasingly part of the (military) conflict domain. To paraphrase Zac Rogers (2019) “populations, not soldiers, are now on the front lines.”
If populations are becoming part of a conflict, the frontline even, we argue it is imperative to understand the societal dimension of cyber conflict. If societal-level cyber-attacks turn cyber conflict into
a society-centric conflict, it seems imperative that we understand what Levite and Shimshoni (2018)refer to as the social dimension. In their essay, the authors illustrate the importance of the public
and its role in society-centric conflict (Ibid, 2018). As such, we argue we must develop an understanding of what we refer to as society-centric cyber conflict (Burgers and Farber, 2021). Rovner(2021) illustrates how to date, a limited understanding of how societies could react to such cyberattacks exists. What happens if society becomes subject to possible blackout and lapses in social order due to cyber-attacks? Rovner (2021) argues that societies could pressure their political leadership to seek a settlement with the attackers. However, what if populations react the opposite way,
and demand a robust and forceful response, possibly even with conventional military means against
an adversary? To date, due to the absence of hard data, it remains speculation how societies would
react and how their reactions could shape the question of how political national-level leadershipwould react to societal-level cyber-attacks.
What is clear, however, is that those cyberattacks are increasingly becoming a pressing issue for societies. Polling by institutions, such as the Pew Center, has illustrated that cyber threats are increasingly on the broader public’s radar. In Japan, which we are based, a 2018 survey by Pew Center illustrated that 81% of the respondents view cyber threats as the top security threat (Poushter, J. andC. Huang, 2019). Respondents in other nations, such as the Netherlands, South Africa, and theUnited States, mark cyber threats as their primary threat, albeit with lesser percentages. These numbers illustrate a significant public fear of cyber threats and -conflict. However, beyond this broader
perception, we have limited detailed understanding of how the public would react to a high impact,high visibility societal-level cyber-attacks, which would cause (national security) crises.
It is important to research further the public’s perception and opinion on societal-level cyber-attacks. In particular, how the public would react and demand their respective governments to reactagainst the perceived attackers. As Klarevas (2002) illustrates, governmental reactions and the decision-making processes on how to react are influenced by public opinion (Klarevas, 2002). Foremostin democratic nations. Prior high-impact, high-visibility national security events that had a significant societal impact, such as 9/11, have illustrated that public opinion could favor and possibly demand even retaliation, at times even demanding escalatory responses from its government. Suchraises the question if such is likely to in the case of successful societal-level cyber-attacks also? In
particular, the absence of established protocols, rules, norms, and red lines increases the value of
public opinion in the decision-making process (Kreps & Das, 2017). In this, our research builds
19further on the work of Kreps and Das (2017), as well as another survey we ran prior, which reaffirmed the need for detailed research on understanding how the public perceives societal-level cyberthreats and how they would react against such threats.
We are especially interested in understanding if and how the public’s reaction could spur the government to react in an escalatory way. The argument that the public plays a role of significant importance in potential escalation and the decision to escalate a conflict, and go to war, is best illustrated by Howard (1979). In his famed essay “The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy,” Howard illustrated the importance of social-political dynamics and public opinions on escalatory behavior andpatterns and military conflict (Howard, 1979). While Howard focused on potential nuclear conflictand escalation to military conflict in the nuclear era, we argue that his argument can, and should be,
be extended to the current situation also. With societal-level cyber-attacks having a similar effect,
impact, and consequences as Howard’s conventional military conflict dynamics, it seems equally
apt to extend his argument on the public’s role and importance of escalatory behavior. Omitting the
public’s perception and reaction from consideration on the escalation potential of societal-levelcyber conflict would omit an essential variable in this process. Howard argued that the “compliancewith […] public opinion became an essential element in the conduct of war” (Howard, 1979,
p.977). In our opinion, such was the case in 1978, and such is the case today also.
To understand the public’s perception and reaction towards societal-level cyber threats and attacks,
we conducted surveys in both Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan – a region we believe remains under-researched in the debate on cyber conflict. In our survey, we asked respondents to respond to
fictive societal-level cyber attacks and rank their responses. This survey produced exciting and unexpected insights, which we will share in our paper and at this conference. The insights gave an us afirst understanding if, how, and by what means the public would like to see a governmental reaction. The sum of this enabled to gain us a better understanding to which extent the public’s role indetermining governmental responses to societal-level cyber-attacks is escalatory or de-escalatory.

REFERENCES
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

Burgers, T. J., & Farber, D. J. (2021). Society-centric cyber conflict and the public’s role and influence in theescalation potential of societal-level cyber-attacks, CCRC/KGRI Working Paper Series, Keio University(forthcoming)
Howard, M. (1979). The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy. Foreign Affairs, 57(5), 975.
https://doi.org/10.2307/20040266
Klarevas, L. (2002). The "Essential Domino" of Military Operations: American Public Opinion and the Use ofForce. International Studies Perspectives, 3(4), 417–437. https://doi.org/10.1111/1528-3577.t01-1-00107
Kreps, S., & Das, D. (2017). Warring from the virtual to the real: Assessing the public’s threshold for war overcyber security. Research & Politics, 4(2), 205316801771593. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168017715930
Levite, A. E., & Shimshoni, J. (Y. (2018). The Strategic Challenge of Society-centric Warfare. Survival, 60(6),91–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2018.1542806
Poushter, J. and C. Huang, 2019: Climate Change Still Seen as the Top Global Threat, but Cyberattacks a Rising Concern. Pew Research Center
Rogers, Z. (2019, June 4). Have Strategists Drunk the "AI Race" Kool-Aid? War on the Rocks. https://warontherocks.com/2019/06/have-strategists-drunk-the-ai-race-kool-aid/
Rovner, J. (2021, March 17). Warfighting in Cyberspace. War on the Rocks. https://warontherocks.com/2021/03/warfighting-in-cyberspace/20

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Moderating the Regulators/Regulating the Moderators
NetzDG and online content moderation in Germany

Fichtner, Laura
Universität Hamburg
Hamburg, Germany
fichtner@informatik.uni-hamburg.de

KEYWORDS
Content Moderation; Public Sphere; Digital Democracy

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.5

21

1

THE PROBLEM OF CONTENT MODERATION

Content moderation describes the rules by which platforms decide to allow or take down content andthe practices that enforce these decisions. While it has always been a part of social media (Gillespie,
2018), content moderation has received increasing public attention as hate speech and hate campaigns, right-wing extremism, ‘election-hacking’, ‘fake news’ and disinformation have become heavily debated issues (see for example Tobin, Varner & Angwin, 2017; Marwick & Lewis, 2017; Van
Zuylen-Wood, 2019; Satariano, 2019; Klonick, 2021; Edelman, 2021). Content moderation practices
draw sometimes difficult distinctions between hate speech, political criticism and satire and freedomof press and disinformation. They determine what we can see and say online and who can participate
on social media, in what ways, with what topics and on whose expense (Pasquale, 2020). In this way,
platforms can set norms of legitimate and acceptable speech and decide which content is politicallyand publicly relevant and which is undesired, dangerous, harmful or detrimental to public discourse(Klonick, 2017). It is this public discourse, meant to guarantee citizens political participation, freedom of expression and access to information, that is often considered essential for liberal democracies(Calhoun, 1992). Thus, content moderation touches upon fundamental values of democracy and calls
for politically legitimate ways of governance and implementation.

2

REGULATING CONTENT MODERATION IN GERMANY

In 2018, Germany introduced the Network Enforcement Act or NetzDG as a response to the challenges of content moderation. This law obliges social media platforms to delete “manifestly unlawful”
content within 24 hours and decide on uncertain cases in 7 days (Bundesministerium der Justiz undfür Verbraucherschutz, 2017, p. 3353). Systematic failure to comply can lead to fines of up to 50
million euros. This was possible, because the German legal code already included speech regulations
regarding for instance insults, defamation and incitement to hatred and violence. NetzDG refers to a
total of 21 legal paragraphs it seeks to enforce (Ibid.). I present and discuss my analysis of media
articles reporting on and discussing the law over a period from its initial proposition until implementation (March 1st 2017 – August 15th 2018). In order to identify different framings of NetzDG, I codeda sample of articles from sources across the political spectrum such as Die Tageszeitung, Süddeutsche
Zeitung, Zeit Online, die Welt, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and netzpolitik.org. My analysis
gives insight into the public reasoning on content moderation, major points of contestation and ethicaland political challenges of regulating social media platforms. While the discussion was tied to thenational and legislative setting in which it took place, it posed fundamental questions about the governance of social media platforms and the social order that reigns online.

3

FRAMING NETZDG

The threat NetzDG might pose to the fundamental right to freedom of expression, and to related rights
like freedom of information and freedom of press, presented one of the biggest criticisms levelledagainst it. This was fueled by a fear of overblocking: while NetzDG imposed fines for the failure todelete unlawful content, it did not prohibit platforms from deleting lawful content. This was seen to
create a lopsided incentive structure that would motivate companies to take down more than necessary, resulting in a restriction on freedom of expression and undermining liberal democracy. In addition, NetzDG was characterized as a violation of the rule of law under which juridical entities should
judge the legality of speech and law enforcement should implement these judgements. NetzDG wasinterpreted as an impermissible privatization of law enforcement that signified a failure of the state22and gave too much power to private companies already characterized by a lack of transparency. Others criticized NetzDG for giving too much power to the state to interfere with public discourse. Suchinterference was understood as detrimental to innovation and technological progress and to the internet’s spirit of freedom, openness and plurality. Regulations like NetzDG were taken as unacceptable
infringements on users’ right to informational self-determination and autonomy. Moreover, such concentration of power within the hands of few big actors seemed to undermine the decentralized character of the internet which was believed to enable free exchange in a market-like structure.
Proponents of the law on the other hand saw NetzDG as a strong move by the state to uphold the law
and the rule of law on the internet. NetzDG appeared as a necessary step to implement legal certainty
online and get internet corporations ‘under control’. Such state engagement was understood to transform the internet’s lawlessness, chaos and anarchy into a space of democratic exchange within therules set by the law. By implementing instances of regulatory control, it was also found to present ameans of protecting social media users as consumers against overbearing companies and opaque anddiscriminatory algorithms as well as against malicious actors who exploited algorithms for their own
gain. In this view, NetzDG was an attempt to hold companies accountable and force them to take up
the social responsibility that came with their power and societal function. By enforcing existing legal
regulations tailored to this purpose, the law was held to contribute to the creation of a public discursive space online. This space was envisioned as inclusive, constructive and safe, enabling everyone
to participate by protecting them from harassment, intimidation, discrimination and silencing.

4

CREATING DIGITAL DEMOCRACY

The controversy over NetzDG can be read as a broader controversy over the future of digital democracy. The discussion asked difficult questions about the limits of freedom of speech, but also prominently featured questions about the institutional arrangements and practices best suited to draw theselines and decide on and enforce deletion practices. While all perspectives claimed to support open
and plural discourse as a way to enable and sustain liberal democracy, they had very different visionsof how this discourse should look like. They centered different values such as freedom of expression,
the rule of law, legal certainty, law and order, consumer protection and corporate accountability, anddifferent aspects of these values. They evoked a diverse set of potential governing mechanisms meant
to bring this discourse forth. These included civil liberties defending against overbearing state interference and enabling a ‘marketplace of idea’, the institution of ‘the law’ and law enforcement online,
state engagement and consumer protection or, following early internet utopias, decentralization andpersonal autonomy. These stood in as abstract yet potent sources of democratic legitimacy for governing online content and speech and promised a politically impartial and procedurally sound basis
for designing a public sphere that was both located within the confines of and produced democracy.
But the technologies themselves and the particular socio-technical conditions reigning on social media also complicated these ‘old’ ways of responding and gave rise to new questions about the design
and governance of public discourse online. How are different frameworks to be applied to contemporary social media platforms? What are the roles and responsibilities of governmental institutions
and state agencies, of corporate actors and platforms and of citizens and users online? How can andshould they act on the internet and relate to each other? What kind of power are they supposed tocarry? The different framings of NetzDG here give insight into a particular set of ways in which social
media platforms could be governed, their ways of socio-technical ordering as well as their limits.
23

5

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As this abstract is part of my dissertation work, I would first of all like to thank my supervisor Prof.
Judith Simon for her guidance and support and her and my entire group at Universität Hamburg fortheir invaluable feedback on my ongoing research. Secondly, I would like to thank Prof. Sheila Jasanoff for her constructive feedback and the Harvard-STS fellows of Spring 2020 for their commentson my project. Finally, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their feedback on an earlier
draft of this abstract.

6

REFERENCES

1.

Gillespie, T. (2018). Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that
Shape Social Media. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

2.

Tobin, A., Varner, M., & Angwin, J. (2017). Facebook’s Uneven Enforcement of Hate Speech Rules Allows Vile
Posts to Stay Up. ProPublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-enforcement-hate-speech-rules-mistakes

3.

Marwick, A., & Lewis, R. (2017). Media manipulation and Disinformation Online. Data & Society Report. New
York, NY.

4.

Van Zuylen-Wood, S. (2019). „Men Are Scum”: Inside Facebook’s War on Hate Speech. Vanity Fair.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/men-are-scum-inside-facebook-war-on-hate-speech

5.

Satariano, A. (2019). Facebook Can Be Forced to Delete Content Worldwide, E.U.’s Top Court Rules. The New
York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/technology/facebook-europe.html

6.

Klonick, K. (2021). Inside the Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court. The New Yorker.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/inside-the-making-of-facebooks-supreme-court

7.

Edelman, G. (2021). On Social Media, American-Style Free Speech is Dead. Wired.
https://www.wired.com/story/on-social-media-american-style-free-speech-is-dead/8.

Pasquale, F. (2020). 4. The Alien Intelligence of Automated Media. In New Laws of Robotics (pp. 89-118). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

9.

Klonick, K. (2017). The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech. Harvard
Law Review., 131, pp. 1598-1670.

10. Calhoun, C. J. (Ed.). (1992). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
11. Bundesministerium der Justiz und für Verbraucherschutz. (2017). Gesetz zur Verbesserung der Rechtsdurchsetzungin sozialen Netzwerken (Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz–NetzDG). Bundesgesetzblatt Jahrgang 2017, Teil I, Nr. 61,
pp. 3352-3355. https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Gesetzgebungsverfahren/Dokumente/BGBl_NetzDG.pdf?__blob=publication File&v=2

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Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

What is a Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere?
Some skeptical remarks on the discourse of digitality
Peisker, Johannes
Martin Luther University
Halle (Saale), Germany
johannes.peisker@gmail.com

KEYWORDS
Political Theory; Theories of Democracy; History of Ideas; Deliberative Democracy; Discursive Democracy; Digital Public Sphere; Structural Transformation; Jürgen Habermas; Richard Rorty

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.6

25

1

EXTENDED ABSTRACT

According to Richard Rorty, the concept of the public sphere probably belongs to the final conceptual
revolution democracy has had and even needed (Rorty 1989). Another major public sphere thinker,
Jürgen Habermas, has dealt extensively with just such a conceptual revolution in his seminal work
“The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” (Habermas 1989). Both observations by Rorty
and Habermas serve as a starting point for theoretical inquiries into the following assumption: For all
the changes digital technologies bring about, they do not force a seismic shift in concepts of political
public spheres in theories of democracy. Like the rise of the normative concept of civil society before(Cohen, Arato 1992), the emergence of digital communication had long been couched in evolutionary
master narratives of ascending freedom, rising communication and broadening democratic participation, in short: a more direct and representative public sphere and thus a more reasonable public opinion. The discourse of digitality, while often sophisticated, reflexive, and self-critical, is not immune
to such normative narratives of deliberative improvement (e. g. Rheingold 1993, Dahlberg 2001,
Froomkin 2003, Bohman 2004, Benkler 2006, Sunstein 2007, Münker 2009).
In the face of certainly new possibilities of the digital communicative means of production, questions
concerning central political communicative relations of production have not fundamentally changed,
for example: quantity and quality of participation, delegation or representation, general will formation, different forms of public opinion for power control and legitimacy, and responsive and accountable political decision making. Hence, it is here pointed out that digital public spheres do notnecessitate new understandings of political public spheres or democracy. Rather, the normativity ofdigitality has come full circle and faces the same old questions of political theory, just like previous
new media (books, newspapers, radio TV, satellite) or once novel concepts of collective agency (proletariat, civil society).
One aim of my contribution is to point to potential critical questions on what it might mean to speakof structural transformations of political public spheres in modern democracies. In order to do so, one
possibility is to advocate for a more general, theoretical, historical and comparative approach to public sphere research. The argument is expounded in two steps: First, a sketch of the analytical wealthof Habermas’s concept of epoch-making socio-historical structural transformation helps to explain
why it is not yet possible to speak of a sweeping new transformation of the political public sphere via
digitality. Second, a glance at concepts of political public spheres, public opinion and agency offeredby different theories of democracy sheds light on a central normative aspect, namely the legitimacy
connection between the (increasingly lost) idea of public opinion and political institutions and elites.
1) Continuously, concepts of political public sphere transformation are narrowly linked to innovations
in communication technology (daily newspapers in cafés, hourly radio and TV in living rooms,
smartphones everywhere and every minute). However, digital public spheres have not yet initiated astructural transformation of democratic political public spheres understood along the line of Habermas’s seminal work. Following Habermas, a structural transformation is not just the invention ofreading newspapers in cafés and debating news. Instead, he notes long term changes in basic social
dimensions. His sociological analysis combines ideal types on a macro level with rich micro level
observations and finds, for example, new subjective understandings of subjectivity itself (that is,mostly the individual bourgeois self of civil society). He differentiates between intimate, private andpublic as well as cultural, economic and political spheres. Habermas’s overall argument is quite
sweeping and has been heavily criticized. For example, the historical narrative of the differentiation26

of the feudal system into state and bourgeois society during the 18th century and the subsequent refusion of society and state beginning at the end of the 19th century is selective and imprecise. Especially the exclusion in his analysis of folk culture and the long-standing political exclusion of womenforced Habermas to revise much of the idealist typology of his old model (Calhoun 1992).
Nevertheless, a main aspect of his sociological concept is that a structural transformation does not
happen just because actors use new means of communication. The concept of structural transformation implies fundamental changes in social relations, economic production, cultural self-understandings and political agency and institutions (Fraser 2010). For example, institutionalization or deinstitutionalization (understood as shared mental models) of collective will-formation and collective
decision-making processes with the power to produce individual obligation in public and private in a
democracy rely on such a structural transformation. Political public spheres are themselves institutions of this kind, shared believes of an area, space, or logic of multi-directional communication that
potentially makes a political difference. In this regard, digitality very meaningfully supplements, butdoes not yet revise general thinking about democratic public spheres.
2) A glance at political public sphere concepts of selected theories of democracy reveals that a normatively central aspects of political thought, namely the relation between public opinion and politicalelites, is not substantially changed by digitality. In a nutshell, democracy in modern society is understood along the lines of a cultural civic self-understanding of subjective rights and citizenship participation in general will formation with a non-determinative view to institutionalized political decision
making. The link between will-formation and decision-making is, of course, the legitimacy producing
effect of public opinion. In this regard, public opinion can be described in various theoretical vocabulary. In constructivist or systems theory terms: members of a chaotic and complex society set an
agenda and imagine a conscious self-regulation in the name of problem-solving (Luhmann 1970,2010). In liberal theory terms: civil society limits a bureaucratic and possibly tyrannic state in thename of freedom and balance (Rorty, Habermas). In Marxist terms: the bourgeoisie uses state andpublic opinion in the name of political-economic power (Marx 1867). In plebeian terms: spectators
publicly disrupt or accredite political elites in the name of populist sovereignty (Green 2016). This
plurality of theoretical perspectives had been overshadowed in the past thirty years by research on
and concepts of democratic deliberation (Chambers 2009).
A more general view on deliberative and especially discursive ideas of democracy promises a wider
scope of epistemic analysis and interpretation. In concepts of discursive democracy, public and digitaldeliberation is but one mode of political action. Others are, for example, public relations, propaganda,“scut work” (Walzer 2007), or plebeian disruption, who are a vital if often troubling part of democratic public spheres. The opening and closing of discourses within a given dispositive, their communicative clashes, coexistence, and fusions hardly rely only on the available means of communication.
In modern democratic political public spheres of any technological make up, they are as much a
power struggle between actors to shape public opinion: competing elites, a plethora of gatekeepers,
differing abilities to organize and advocate ideas and interests in processes of collective will-formation and political decision-making. Again, digital communication supplements such forms of action, but sparsely evokes new categories of political thinking. Concludingly (and contra Rorty), insocial research on structural transformations of political public spheres in modern democracies novel
concepts are possibly discovered more easily if theoretically diverse and historically informed pathsof normatively heterogenous comparisons and contrasts are applied.

27

2

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28. Koselleck, Reinhart (1988): Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge: MIT Press.
29. Luhmann, Niklas (1970): Öffentliche Meinung. In: Politische Vierteljahresschrift 11 (1), 2–28.
30. Luhmann, Niklas (2010): Politische Soziologie. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
31. Marx, Karl (1867): Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Erster Band. Buch I: Der Produktionsprozess desKapitals. Hamburg: Otto Meissner (MEGA II/5).
32. Münker, Stefan (2009): Emergenz digitaler Öffentlichkeiten. Die Sozialen Medien des Web 2.0. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
33. Pfetsch, Barbara (2020): Democracy and Digital Dissonance. The Co-Occurrence of the Transformation of Political
Culture and Communication Infrastructure. In: Central European Journal of Communication 13 (1), 96–110.
34. Poster, Mark (1997): Cyberdemocracy. Internet and the Public Sphere. In: David Porter (ed.): Internet Culture.
New York: Routledge, 201–218.
35. Rasmussen, Terje (2014): The Significance of Internet Communication in Public Deliberation. In: Javnost - The
Public 16 (1), 17–32.
36. Rheingold, Howard (1993): The Virtual Community. Homesteading at the Electronic Frontier. Reading: AddisonWesley.
37. Rorty, Richard (1989): Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
38. Sunstein, Cass R. (2007): Republic.com 2.0. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
39. Walzer, Michael (2007b): Deliberation, and What Else? In: Michael Walzer: Thinking Politically. Essays in Political Theory. New Haven: Yale University Press, 134–146.

29

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2020

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Collective Civic Engagement and Civic Counter Publics
Theoretical reflections upon a new phenomenon

Friess, Dennis
University of Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf, Germany
dennis.friess@hhu.de

KEYWORDS
Public Sphere; Counter Publics; Civic Engagement; Online Activism; Normative Theory

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.7

30

1

INTRODUCTION

The Internet has been described as public battle ground were hegemonic perspectives frequently clash(Dahlberg, 2007). Against this agonistic understanding of cyber space, studies have investigatedcounter publics which try to promote their own narratives and political agendas online (Kaiser &Puschmann, 2017; Toepfl & Piwoni, 2018). While previous research has more and more focused on“disruptive forces” (Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018) such as conspiracy theorists or extremist groups, thispaper adopts another perspective by focusing on civic forces which promote democratic norms inpublic discourses. The public promotion of democratic norms online has recently been introduced as
Online Civic Intervention (OCI) – a form of user participation that aims to restore deliberative debate(Porten-Cheé et al., 2020). OCI so far, has adopted a micro-level perspective neglecting theoreticalconsiderations for the meso- and macro-level. This paper wants to fill this gap by introducing theconcepts of Collective Civic Engagement (CCE; meso-level) and Civic Counter Publics (CCP;
macro-level).
Both concepts originate from the observation that people speak up against the violation of democratic
principles in online discussions which can be derived from deliberative theory (Friess & Eilders,2015). While these civic interventions are naturally performed by individuals, we have also seen theemergence of online activist groups such as the Iam-here-Network (Iam-here-network, 2020), Reconquista Internet (Garland et al., 2020), or the International Network against Cyber-Hate (INACH,
2020). These groups envision to improve online discussions by promoting deliberative norms suchas rationality, empathy, and civility. Group members are regular citizens who engage with some senseof common good orientation. Therefore, we characterize these activities as a form of civic engagement (Adler & Goggin, 2005). In addition to that, these activity patterns resemble those investigatedunder the term of online collective action (Harlow & Harp, 2010). Thus, we investigate such behavior
under the term Collective Civic Engagement (Friess, Ziegele & Hainbach, 2020).
While collective civic engagement can be researched on the meso-level in terms of internal organization, social constitution, and group identity, it can also be considered a macro phenomenon shifting
the focus towards public spheres. This macro perspective becomes accurate when we consider theoutcomes of such group activities which is the overall quality of public online debates. In the following we want to make some brief remarks on online publics before discussing the concepts of CCE
and CCP in more detail. We conclude with some normative reflections.

2

ONLINE PUBLICS - THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Originating in political philosophy, public sphere conceptions have influenced a broad range of different disciplines including communication scholarship. Particularly, the rapid distribution of the internet has stimulated manifold theoretical reflections on online public spheres (e.g., Bennett &Pfetsch, 2018; Frieß, 2020; Papacharissi, 2002). Against the backdrop of its popularity and the plurality of conceptions, the concept of the public sphere can be described as an “essentiality contested
concept” (Rauchfleisch, 2017). Therefore, it is important to gain some degree of clarification. However, since an in-depth discussion of different public sphere conceptions is beyond the scope of thisabstract (but see: Dahlberg, 2011; Ferree et al., 2002), we will proceed straightforward by proposing
an idea how online publics can be described.

31

According to Habermas (1974) the public sphere is a realm of social life where public opinion can beformed. This conception emphasizes the productive character of the public sphere which is not just a
communicative space where different opinions are articulated (like in the liberal tradition), but rather
mutually contested and discursively (trans)formed. At the end of this process something like public
opinion may emerge, which ideally legitimates public policies (Habermas, 1996). This interpretation,
however, puts a very strong focus on the generation of legitimacy that ultimately safeguards democratic policy making. Other authors have moved away from this intermediating understanding, stressing the social and cultural aspects of public spheres. This goes hand in hand with the general acknowledgment that there are rather multiple public spheres than one singular public (Asen, 2000; Fraser,
1990, Poor, 2006). In this interpretation, a public is a communicative entity: “A public is a space of
discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself.” (Warner, 2002, p. 413). Warner alsostresses the constitutional role of the audience without which no public can exist. Together, communication and an audience that gathers around some topic or issue provide necessary conditions to forma public.
These patterns of publics seem easily adaptable for the online environment. An online public is constituted in the moment when an audience gathers, more or less publicly, in order to discuss a topic or
issue considered to be relevant for the participants (Frieß, 2020). Such publics can emerge in online
forums, on news websites, or in comment sections attached to news articles on platforms such as
Facebook or Twitter. Previous research has analyzed such publics in many respects. Especially, theanalysis of the textual quality of online publics has received much attention. Thus, several studies
have analyzed whether or under which circumstances online publics live up to norms of deliberationsuch as civility, rationality, and reciprocity, which are believed to be good indicators for a democratic
public discourse (e.g., Esau, Friess & Eilders, 2017; Rowe, 2015; Ruiz et al., 2011). While deliberation is also possible to accrue online, recent research suggests that incivility is a very present phenomena in many online publics: controversial issues, such as migration, crime, or religion regularly
attract high volumes of hateful and derogatory contributions and thus undermine democratic discourse (Coe, Kenski, Rains, 2014; Ziegele et al., 2018).
Reflecting the increasing dominance of such sort of discourse, Davis (2021, p. 143) has outlined theidea of anti-public spheres, which he defines as online spaces of “socio-political interaction where
discourse routinely and radically flouts the ethical and rational norms of democratic discourse.” According to him, such discourse is characterized by a lack of reasons, reflexivity, and rationality whichmakes it appealing for conspiracy theorists. It is further characterized by an antagonistic attitude as
well as anti-elitist, anti-statist, and anti-cosmopolitan positions (Davis, 2021). It goes without sayingthat such anti-publics stand in stark contrast to deliberative ideals of the public sphere and the potential benefits associated with it.

3

COLLECTIVE CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AND CIVIC COUNTER PUBLICS

It is exactly this perceived dominance of anti-democratic online communication which has attracted
scientific, political, and civil society’s attention in recent years. The emergence of concepts such as
Online Civic Intervention (OCI), Collective Civic Engagement (CCE), and Civic Counter Publics(CCP)is a direct reaction to the factual increase of what Davis (2021) has called anti-publics in which
norms of deliberation are radically flouted. All concepts are closely related. However, a distinction
across these concepts seems desirable.

32

According to Porten-Cheè et al. (2020, p. 515), Online Civic Intervention (OCI) is “a new form ofuser-based political participation in the digital sphere that aims to restore an accessible and reasoned
public debate – a form of user participation that aims to restore deliberative debate.” Individuals
exercise OCI by reporting, flagging, or counterarguing toxic comments. Since they do so on an individual bases, we consider OCI to be a micro-level phenomenon.1
We have recently introduced the concept of Collective Civic Moderation (Friess et al., 2020), which
we slightly adjust for the purpose of this abstract when we talk about Collective Civic Engagement(CCE). We define CCE as the systematic and concerted interventions by groups pursuing the sharedgoal of facilitating democratic discourse online. CCE aligns with established concepts such as collective action because it pursues a collective purpose (Postmes & Brunsting, 2002). It further relates tocorrective action since CCE seeks to counteract the negative influences of certain online content thatis perceived as harmful (Golan & Lim, 2016). Finally, it is a form of civic engagement because thegroup members engage as volunteers with a sense of common good orientation (Adler & Goggin,2005). Since CCE is performed by organized groups, we consider it to be a meso-level phenomenon.
The concept of Civic Counter Publics (CCP) has not been introduced yet. We argue that CCE cancontribute to CCP when it is able to set the tone back to civility. Nevertheless, proposing the idea ofa civic counter public may seem counterintuitive since counter publics, by definition, need a hegemonic public to counter. Attaching the attribute ‘civic’ indicates that the dominant public is somehow‘uncivic’. However, we have already mentioned that research suggests that incivility is a very present
phenomenon in many online publics (Coe, Kenski, Rains, 2014; Davis, 2021; Ziegele et al., 2018).
Thus, uncivil discourse can be considered to be hegemonic in some online publics that emerge aroundcontroversial issues such as migration, crime, or religion which also may be characterized to be antipublics (Davis, 2021). However, the theoretical idea of civic counter publics stands in contrast to
previous thoughts on counter publics we briefly want to recapitulate.
The academic writing on counter publics took off with the already mentioned assessment that a singular public sphere, like envisioned in Habermas’ (1989) early writings, is not suitable for pluralsocieties (Fraser, 1990). Along these lines, Benhabib (1992) holds that “there may be as many publics
as there are controversial debates about the validity of norms” (p. 105). This assumption, which also
holds true for the internet, is no longer contested: “nearly all scholars of the public sphere agree that
our social world is composed of multiple, overlapping, and unequal publics.” (Breese, 2011, p. 132)
In this realm, Asen (2000) states that the original conception of counter publics discloses unequal
power relations in modern societies. In fact, early writings almost exclusively focused on historicallydisadvantaged groups such as women, feminists, homosexuals, or black people (Fraser, 1990; Gregory, 1995; Warner, 2002). Thus, the term counter publics has (always) been associated with social
inequality and described the individual and collective efforts to create public spaces where both grouprelated issues and identity can be freely discussed because there was no sufficient representation or
space in the dominant ‘mainstream’ public (Breese, 2011; Fraser, 1990; Warner, 2002). While earlycounter pubic research has mainly focused on certain groups and communities, more recent research
has shifted the focus towards issues and topics (e.g. climate change; or EU policy) where counter
publics want to establish certain narratives and reframe meanings or interpretations of the issue underdiscussion (e.g. Kaiser, 2017; Toepfl & Piwoni, 2015).

1

We limit the discussion of OCI in this abstract and refer to the original authors (Porten-Cheé et al., 2020).
33

With regard to CCP, these points of reference change. It is no longer race, sexual orientation, or
gender, nor the specific issues or a policy field that integrates a counter public but rather the mutualcommitment to certain discursive values such as rationality, respect, empathy, and civility. While theviolation of those norms in fact seems often go hand in hand with intolerance, racism, and homophobia, it has to be very clear that CCP do not intend to discuss specific topics or issues but rather change
the way how they are discussed. Thus, CCE engages on a macro-level by trying to influence the way
how controversial issues are publicly discussed by setting the tone back to civility.

4

CRITICAL NORMATIVE REFLECTIONS

Conclusively, we want to sketch some normative reflections on CCE which ultimately are able toconstitute CCP. Firstly, we should ask whether such movements exercise discursive exclusion. This
problem has formerly been articulated by feminist authors (Fraser, 1990; Sanders, 1998; Young,2000) with regard to Habermas’ bourgeois public sphere conception. Drawing on Bourdieu’s idea of
habitus, Fraser (1990) pointed out that certain groups in society who tend to speak in different manners, may not meet the standards of rational discourses envisioned by Habermas and others. In thiscontext, the capacity of rational-critical debate can be seen as ‘linguistic capital’ which is distributed
unequally among participants in public discourses. Those who do not possess those linguistic skills
are consequently excluded or silenced. In this vein, Asen (2000) has stated that the counter in counter
publics can have manifold meanings. However, they all feed in some sort of exclusion from thebroader public in terms of persons and topics but also speaking styles. The latter is of main interest
here. However, we deliberately do not want to accuse activists to practice discursive exclusion but
rather point to the thin line between exclusion and the legitimate effort to maintain a democratic
discussion climate.
Secondly, from a normative perspective, one may argue that while CCE aims to defend norms ofdeliberation, it may also violate some of them.2 This is best illustrated by the strategic background of
CCE where members gather in secret groups and closed networks to coordinate their actions. This
strategic element stands in stark contrast to Habermas’ (1984) ideal of communicative action. In addition to that, it goes without saying that a coordinated group exercises massive power in public online
discussion, which again violates one of the core ideals of Habermas’ ideal speech situation. Consequently, advocates of a free public sphere face the normative dilemma whether the ends justify themeans: Is it normatively desirable to endorse a collective actor who engages in public discourse tofoster deliberative norms? Or does this contradict the basic idea of deliberation where the only force
in place should be the forceless force of the better argument?
Finally, a related issue concerns the question of whether the interventions of CCE groups are related
to a specific political ideology. Research has mostly investigated this question in the context of farright online activist groups which try to manipulate and bias public discourse by propagating theirideologies (Applebaum et al., 2017; Caiani & Wagemann, 2009). Much less is known about CCM
groups. For example, it is unknown whether the engagement of groups such as #ichbinhier or Reconquista Internet only aim at promoting a specific form of expressing one’s thoughts (i.e., in a respectful,rational, and constructive way), or if the groups also pursue own political agendas.

2

This paragraph draws mainly on a discussion already published by Friess et al. (2020, p. 16).
34

5

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Caiani, M., & Wagemann, C. (2009). Online networks of the Italian and German extreme right. Information,
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https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/10639
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39. Rauchfleisch, A. (2017). The public sphere as an essentially contested concept: A co-citation analysis of the last 20
years of public sphere research. Communication and the Public, 2(1), 3–18.
40. Rowe, I. (2015). Deliberation 2.0: Comparing the deliberative quality of online news user comments across platforms. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 59(4), 539–555.
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62(4) 636–653.

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Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

The Emergence and Persistence of Online Civic
Intervention as a Discourse Norm
A network simulation model

Maier, Daniel
German Cancer Consortium (DKTK)Frankfurt (Main), Germany
daniel.maier@kgu.dePorten-Cheé, Pablo
Heidelberg University
Heidelberg, Germany
pablo.porten-chee@uni-heidelberg.de

Kunst, Marlene
Freie Universität Berlin
Berlin, Germany
marlene.kunst@fu-berlin.de

KEYWORDS
Incivility; hate speech; counter speech; discourse norms; simulation

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.837Disrespectful, pejorative, and vulgar speech has become a widespread threat to the deliberative
potential of today’s online discourses (Chen, 2017). Yet, while platforms often fail to moderate
uncivil content properly, ordinary users increasingly take on responsibility for a functional discourse
online. Thus, the present study builds on the concept of online civic intervention (OCI), which isdefined as actions taken by users to fight disruptive online behavior (Porten-Cheé, Kunst, & Emmer,2020). This study follows a dynamic perspective and aims to investigate how OCI emerges, diffuses,and persists as a discourse norm over time.
We focus on counter speech as one specific type of OCI. Counter speech are verbal responses to
uncivil users, which aims to deescalate the situation by, for instance, calling for a respectful tone.
Drawing on social learning theory (Bandura, 1977), we assume that when individuals are exposed tocounter speech online, they may feel compelled to engage in counter speech themselves. Theircounter speech may, in turn, be observed by other users and encourage them to engage in counterspeech as well. Given these expected dynamics, we aim to explore whether counter speech as anindividual-level behavior may form an inter-individual discourse norm over time. For this purpose,
we designed a simulation model that allows us to investigate the interplay of individual-level andcontextual-level factors with regard to the formation of discourse norms. Factors, such as individual
willingness to engage in OCI as well as exposure to platform policies that encourage users to intervene(Naab, Kalch, & Meitz, 2018) are included in the simulation because they have shown to affect OCI.
Eventually, we aim to answer the following research question: How do individual and contextual
factors contribute to the emergence and persistence of OCI as a discourse norm? We draw on the
results of an empirically informed stochastic network simulation model. The model consists of agents
who participate in discussions on platforms. The platforms, in turn, allow agents to mutually observe
the discursive behavior of all participants. The model’s logic is straightforward: The observation of
OCIs lowers the agents’ tolerance level for incivility and, thus, increases their willingness tointervene. In contrast, if agents observe that incivility is ignored by others, their tolerance level for
incivility rises over time, which, in turn, decreases their willingness to intervene. To find out, howplatform policies play out on the dynamics of OCI as a discourse norm, different scenarios aremodeled, where content moderation and encouragement for OCI are systematically varied. Overall,our simulation model may serve to identify the conditions under which individual discourse behaviors
form persisting discourse norms that are key for a functional public discourse online.

REFERENCES
1.

Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice Hall.

2.

Chen, G. M. (2017). Nasty talk: Online incivility and public debate. Palgrave Macmillan.

3.

Naab, T., Kalch, A., & Meitz, T. (2018). Flagging uncivil user comments: Effects of intervention information, typeof victim, and response comments on bystander behavior. New Media & Society, 20(2)4.

Porten-Cheé, P., Kunst, M., & Emmer, M. (2020). Online civic intervention: A new form of political participation
under conditions of a disruptive online discourse. International Journal of Communication, 14, 514–534.
https://doi.org/1932–8036/20200005

38

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Digital Practices
Whose voices are we hearing?

Schäfer, Hilmar
Institut für Sozialwissenschaften
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Berlin, Germany
hilmar.schaefer@hu-berlin.de

KEYWORDS
Practice theory; algorithms; digital culture; subjectivity

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.9

39Recently, it came as a surprise to learn that many tech companies are turning to humans to transcribe and analyze audio recordings in order to improve their speech assistance systems. This caseis remarkable, not only because it has sparked debate over privacy issues, but also because a hoodwinked public has rediscovered the human practices at the heart of what is supposedly digital—anarcissistic injury afflicting socially overestimated notions of technological performance.
This case illustrates one of the many challenges that digitalization poses for sociological theory: thequestion of the capacity to act. Do workers act like algorithms or do the algorithms perform actions? What potential for action does the digital have? The concept of action in methodological individualism, with its restriction to the rationally acting and meaning-seeking individual, seems to bereaching its limits in the face of complex interlinkages between human and nonhuman elements.
In the paper, I propose to analyze (1.) digital culture proceeding from the concept of practice. The
sociological theory of practice (with its roots in American pragmatism and Ludwig Wittgenstein'slate philosophy, shaped by Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, and now systematized into a theoretical movement) offers an alternative research program to established sociological concepts. In
contrast to the concept of action, practice theory decenters the acting subject: The subject's ability to
act is due to historically preexisting practices that have shifted in time and space and are taken up
and repeated by the subject. In the process, artefacts are also brought into focus as participants inaction. Thus, practice theory enables an analytical consideration of nonhuman elements; however, it
reserves the concept of practice for humans, since its focus so far has been on physical performanceand embodied knowledge.
On this basis, I develop (2.) a modification of the theory of practice that places its focus on the repetition and identification of patterns of practice—a potential that is also available to digital programs,so that we can also speak of “digital practices” and carry out a symmetrical analysis of human andnonhuman elements.
As described in the call, the debate on digitalization often oscillates between promises of salvationand cultural pessimism, with the extent and consequences of digitization often being either over- or
underestimated. Starting from a praxeological perspective, I develop and interrelate (3.) two hypotheses with each other: The strong hypothesis that algorithms and software themselves have thecapacity to act will be complemented by a relativizing hypothesis, according to which they only
have this capacity in the context of human practice: a) Algorithms repeat or replace practices suchas calculating, comparing, and evaluating, b) they do so because of programming that reproduces
social power relations, c) they are only relevant by entering into human practices, by being programmed, used, and received and by changing the form and intensity of previously nondigital practices. At this point, a particular achievement of the digital is also highlighted, which explains its
rapid and widespread dissemination: the ability to interlink and reconfigure practices.
Finally, I will demonstrate (4.) the analytical benefit of a shift from actions to practices and, within
practice theory, from physical performance to repetition and identification via selected case studies
such as the one described above. The symmetrical description of human and nonhuman elements ofpractice can open up sociological questions for consideration, such as: What difference does it makefor participants whether a human, a bot, or an algorithm “acts”? What consequences does this havefor the attribution of responsibility? What effects does this have on society's perception of digitalization?
40

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Drifting Away From the Mainstream
Media attention and the politics of hyperpartisan news websites

Yan, Pu
Oxford Internet Institute
Oxford, UK
pu.yan@oii.ox.ac.uk

Schroeder, Ralph
Oxford Internet Institute
Oxford, UK
ralph.schroeder@oii.ox.ac.uk

KEYWORDS
Hyperpartisan media; populism; web-tracking data; computational social science; media attention

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.10

41

1

INTRODUCTION

Populism has recently enjoyed successes in Europe, in the US, and beyond. Populist leaders and theirsupporters have accused "mainstream" media of being part of a "corrupt" elite that misrepresents thewill of the virtuous "people". Distrust of the media has also led to the rejection of traditional media
sources for political information and given prominence to alternative or hyperpartisan sources suchas Breitbart. These alternatives have become important media outlets for populist party leaders andtheir supporters. However, there is limited research about who consumes hyperpartisan media, how
the audience of hyperpartisan media is interconnected, and the content of hyperpartisan media. By
combining an analysis of a survey with website visits and website content (building on previous work,
Stier, Kirkizh, Froio & Schroeder 2020; Yan, Schroeder & Stier 2021) this paper shows the link
between populist party support and hyperpartisan media visits.

2

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Our main research questions, led by previous research (including de Vreese, Esser, Aalberg, &Stanyer, 2018; Holt, Ustad Figenschou, & Frischlich, 2019) are: (RQ1) What are the audiences for
hyperpartisan websites? Once we have answered this question, we ask, in (RQ2), what is the networkof hyperpartisan websites as measured by their shared audiences? Finally, we examine, in (RQ3),
what is the media agenda of hyperpartisan media?

3

CONCLUSIONSIn the full paper, we will present extensive findings from our study. These findings provide a rich anddetailed picture of the political support and media trust of visitors to hyperpartisan websites and the
network structure and content of hyperpartisan news media during our period of study. Here webriefly summarize our main conclusions and implications: Our study shows that the reach of hyperpartisan media, measured by the percentage of panellists who visited hyperpartisan news domains,is 5.32%. We find a statistically significant link between support for right-wing populist parties andvisits to hyper-partisan media while the association between left-wing populist party support andhyperpartisan media visits is much weaker. More importantly perhaps, we find that distrust in publicbroadcasters and trust in social media both increase the likelihood of visiting hyperpartisan media
websites, particularly among right-wing populist party supporters. There is also a larger context forour study, which is that the period under consideration was a highly volatile one in American politics:
the Mueller report into President Trump’s connections with Russia was a focus of controversy, withthe findings of the report and resulting implications eagerly anticipated by different political factions.
One obvious feature of the vast bulk of hyperpartisan content in this regard is its negative and criticalorientation: attack on elite progressive causes which are perceived as extreme is pervasive, while themuch less prominent left-oriented hyperpartisan sites are geared towards motivating political activists. Partisan-fuelled false news and conspiracy theories also feature prominently on hyperpartisan
news websites. Further, topic modelling results suggest that while hyperpartisan sites in European
countries disproportionately focused on Muslims and immigration, conspiracy theories on hyperpartisan news in the US centred around party politics (such as news content about the “deep state”).
Further, the reach of certain hyperpartisan networks and their content attract attention across national
and, it seems, linguistic, boundaries, even if linguistic boundaries are still the stronger shapers of42

reach and attention. All in all, at a time when there is intense contention about the nature of impartiality and objectivity in news and about political partisanship, our analysis adds to this body of research the finding that, especially for right-wing populist supporters, there is what could be called aparallel universe of hyperpartisan websites providing political information that has drifted away fromthe ‘mainstream’ of news journalism.

4

REFERENCES

1.

de Vreese, C. H., Esser, F., Aalberg, T., R., C., & Stanyer, J. (2018). Populism as an Expression of Political Communication Content and Style: A New Perspective. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 23(4), 423–438.

2.

Holt, K., Ustad Figenschou, T., & Frischlich, L. (2019). Key Dimensions of Alternative News Media. Digital Journalism, 7(7), 860-869. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2019.1625715

3.

Stier, S., Kirkizh, N., Froio, C, & Schroeder, R. (2020). Populist attitudes and selective exposure toonline news: A
cross-country analysis combining web tracking and surveys. The International Journal of Press/Politics.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161220907018

4.

Yan, P, Ralph Schroeder & Sebastian Stier (2021): Is there a link between climate change scepticism and populism? An analysis of web tracking and survey data from Europe and the US, Information, Communication & Society, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1864005

43

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Incivility and Political Dissent
Multiple roles of aggressive speech in comments on Russian YouTube

Bodrunova, Svetlana S.
St. Petersburg State University
St. Petersburg, Russia
s.bodrunova@spbu.ru

Litvinenko, Anna
Freie Universitaet Berlin
Berlin, Germany
anna.litvinenko@fu-berlin.deBlekanov, Ivan
St. Petersburg State University
St. Petersburg, Russia
i.blekanov@spbu.ru

KEYWORDS
Communicative aggression; Incivility; Networked discussions; Russia; political protest

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.11

44

Today, uncivil verbal behavior is generally perceived as a threat to democratic quality of public discourse (Vollhardt et al., 2007; Miller & Vaccari, 2020), including integrity and rationality of online
discussions (Badjatiya et al., 2017). Some research shows that these effects are moderate. Thus, harshcommenting can trigger an increase in readers’ hostile cognitive reactions but does not help incivility
grow in the recipients’ commenting behavior (Rösner, Winter & Krämer, 2016), even if the acceptance of flaming as decent behavior and intention to flame is higher for verbally aggressive
YouTube users (Cicchirillo, Hmielowski & Hutchens, 2015). But the claim that aggressive content
is, in general, destructive for online discussions is not contested.
Several rare works, though, have dragged attention to controversial relations between free expression
and hate speech (Dorsett, 1996; Cammaerts, 2009), as well as to specific functions of aggressive
content, for community building and cultural delineation/(de)alignment. Thus, possible use of uncivil
language in positive sense was discussed for communication of discriminated communities like
LGBTQ (Davidson et al., 2017) or African Americans, especially in the rap lyrics (Spears, 1998;
Schneider, 2010). Also, it has been shown that harsh language ‘is not solely a product of an individual
speech habit but also a spreadable social practice’ (Kwon & Gruzd, 2017, p 1).
In various periods of the Russian political history, certain types of uncivil language (like obscene
speech) have gained political relevance, if not prominence. It has not only been a sign of politicaltransformation (see the classic work of Seliscev (1928)) but also a rhetorical tool, including for thepoliticians in Russia and Ukraine in the 2000s (Gasparov, 2006). Today’s detabooization of obscene
lexicon (‘mat’) and widening the boundaries of mat-based communicative behavior in the Russian
everyday discourse, as well as in media, political speeches, and youth communication, is seen as areaction to over-officialized Soviet public rhetoric (Ablamskaya, 2011). The use of ‘unofficial’ language is seen as a form of social protest, emotional détente, and assignment of phrasal emphasis; aswell, mat words are used as connective particles to condense speech. Over 60% of people who detaboo harsh talk are 14 to 30 years old (Ablamskaya, 2011). Another part of harsh speech – that is,radical and extremist one – has also been widespread on Runet, the Russian-speaking segment of theinternet (Salimovsky & Ermakova 2011). These processes of detabooization and radicalization of
discourses change the status of uncivil speech itself: in opinion of several scholars, it no longer
strongly marks particular social groups and is used more situationally, as a tool for inter-group adaptation.
Given this, aggressive speech may gain new roles online, including the abovementioned spurring offlaming, marking new user groupings or influencers, or facilitating inter-group user ‘migration’. Normatively, these roles may be also positive, not just negative. This might be especially true for restrictive political and legal environments like Russia of today where obscene lexicon is prohibited by law
in registered media and the political environment does not give much space for voicing discontent.
As Russian Youtube has since the 2000s become an ‘alternative television’ (Litvinenko, 2021) politically polarized (Ushkin, 2014) and dominated by voices of liberal opposition (Etling et al., 2010) but
also containing pro-state voices who often imitate user-generated content, we have chosen it for ourinvestigation.
Building upon the concept of communicative aggression (Sidorov, 2018) and today’s works on multiclass detection of toxic speech (Badjatiya et al., 2017; Park & Fung, 2017), we explore the roles of
two under-researched types of communicative aggression—obscene speech and politically motivatedhate speech—within the publics of video commenters. We do so by addressing the following research45questions: (RQ1) Does communicative aggression affect discussion dynamics? (RQ2) What roles dovarious types of communicative aggression play in political discussions online?
Taking Russian YouTube as an example, we use the case of the Moscow protests of 2019 against
non-admission of independent and oppositional candidates to run for the Moscow city parliament.
The sample of over 77,000 comments for 13 videos of more than 100,000 views has undergone preprocessing and vocabulary-based detection of communicative aggression. To assess the impact of
uncivil speech upon the dynamics of the discussions, we have used Granger tests and assessment of
discussion histograms; we have also assessed the selected groups of posts in an exploratory manner.
Our findings demonstrate that communicative aggression fuels discussion under commentaries bypolitical activists, while under commentaries by foreign news media both effects appear in weak to
medium state, and, under news pieces, the effects are clearly much less sound. In smaller discussions,obscene language might be provocative and bring on politically harsh speech, while, in bigger discussions, this effect is overcome.
Anti-state hate speech is certainly destructive to potential consensus between political antagonists,
however is might become a constructive means of counter-public consolidation. Among other things,
communicative aggression helps to express immediate support and solidarity. In the Russian case,communicative aggression is linked to giving voice to political opposition, which is overwise excluded from the mainstream discourse, and may foster counter-publics and offline action. This function of aggressive speech is in line with the strand of research on agonistic public spheres that emphasizes the importance of political conflict and political voices ‘from the margins’ for public deliberation (Dahlberg, 2007, p. 128). If, as in Russia, obscene language is officially banned in the media,
using this kind of uncivil language per se might become a way to challenge the hegemonic official
discourses.

REFERENCES
1.

Ablamskaya, E. V. (2011). Expansion of mionectic vocabulary in modern russian language. Academic Bulletin of
Tavricheski National University n.a. V. I. Vernadsky, series ‘Philology. Social Communications’, 24 (63) - 2(2),119-123.

2.

Badjatiya, P., Gupta, S., Gupta, M., & Varma, V. (2017, April). Deep learning for hate speech detection in tweets.
In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion (pp. 759-760).

3.

Cammaerts, B. (2009). Radical pluralism and free speech in online public spaces: The case of North Belgian extreme right discourses. International journal of cultural studies, 12(6), 555-575.

4.

Cicchirillo, V., Hmielowski, J., & Hutchens, M. (2015). The mainstreaming of verbally aggressive online politicalbehaviors. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 18(5), 253-259.

5.

Dahlberg, L. (2007). The Internet and discursive exclusion: From deliberative to agonistic public sphere Theory.
In: Dahlberg, L., Siapera, E. (eds.), Radical democracy and the Internet (pp. 128–147). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

6.

Davidson, T., Warmsley, D., Macy, M., & Weber, I. (2017, May). Automated hate speech detection and the problem of offensive language. In Eleventh international AAAI conference on web and social media.

7.

Denisova, A., & Herasimenka, A. (2019). How Russian Rap on YouTube Advances Alternative Political Deliberation: Hegemony, Counter-Hegemony, and Emerging Resistant Publics. Social Media+ Society, 5(2),2056305119835200.

8.

Dorsett, D. M. (1996). Hate Speech Debate and Free Expression. S. Cal. Interdisc. LJ, 5, 259.

9.

Etling, B., Alexanyan, K., Kelly, J., Faris, R., Palfrey, J. G., & Gasser, U. (2010). Public discourse in the Russian
blogosphere: Mapping RuNet politics and mobilization. Berkman Center Research Publication, (2010-11).

46

10. Gasparov, B. (2006). Suržyk: A glance from a personal perspective. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 28(1/4), 117-128.
11. Kwon, K. H., & Gruzd, A. (2017). Is aggression contagious online? A case of swearing on Donald Trump’s campaign videos on YouTube. In: Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. URL:
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/41417/1/paper0268.pdf.
12. Litvinenko, A. (2021). YouTube as Alternative Television in Russia: Political Videos During the Presidential Election Campaign 2018. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120984455
13. Miller, M. L., & Vaccari, C. (2020). Digital threats to democracy: Comparative lessons and possible remedies. The
International Journal of Press/Politics, 25(3), 333–356. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161220922323
14. Park, J. H., & Fung, P. (2017). One-step and two-step classification for abusive language detection on twitter. arXiv
preprint arXiv:1706.01206.
15. Rösner, L., Winter, S., & Krämer, N. C. (2016). Dangerous minds? Effects of uncivil online comments on aggressive cognitions, emotions, and behavior. Computers in Human Behavior, 58, 461-470.
16. Salimovsky, V. A., Ermakova, L. M. (2011). Extremist discourse in Runet communication. Bulletin of Perm
Unievrsity, series ‘Russian and Foreign Philology’, 3(15), 71-80.
17. Schneider, C. J. (2011). Culture, rap music,“bitch,” and the development of the censorship frame. American Behavioral Scientist, 55(1), 36-56.
18. Seliscev, A. M. (1928). Yazyk relolitsionnoy epohi: Iz nablyudeniy nad russkim yazykom poslednih let (19171926) [Language of the revolutionary epoch: Observing the Russian language of the recent years (1917-1926)].
Moscow.
19. Sidorov, V.A. (2018). Communicative aggressions of the 21st century: Definition and analysis of the prerequisites.
Bulletin of St.Petersburg University, series ‘Language and Literature’, 15(2), 300–311.
20. Spears, A. K. (1998). African-American language use: Ideology and so-called obscenity. In: Mufwene, S. S., Bailey, G., Baugh, J., and J. R. Rickford (eds), African-American English: Structure, history, and use (pp. 226-250).
New York: Routledge.
21. Ushkin, S. G. (2014). Consumers’ comments on protest actions in the Russian-language Youtube segment.
Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies], 6, 127-133.
22. Vollhardt, J., Coutin, M., Staub, E., Weiss, G., & Deflander, J. (2007). Deconstructing hate speech in the DRC: A
psychological media sensitization campaign. Journal of Hate Studies, 5(15), 15–35. http://doi.org/10.33972/jhs.40

47

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Between Anarchy and Order
Digital campaigning heuristics in hybrid media environments

Schäfer, Andreas
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Berlin, Germany
andreas.schaefer.1@hu-berlin.deGardner, Beth Gharrity
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark
bega@soc.ku.dk

KEYWORDS
Democratic Public Sphere; Political Parties; Election Campaigns; Heuristics; Strategies; Social Media; Communication Environment

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.12

48

The digitalization of the mediated public sphere challenges formerly established norms and routinesof democratic competition. Reaching multiple audiences via multiple social media platforms has
become an integral part of election campaigns. Yet, the dynamics of decentralization and disruptionthat mark contemporary hybrid media environments – such as the proliferation of platforms, disinformation, opaque algorithms, novel analytics, and audience fragmentation – also make the standardization of new digital campaigning strategies and norms of institutionally appropriate communication elusive for political campaign practitioners (e.g., Bennett & Pfetsch 2018; Chadwick 2013;
Karpf 2016). This raises a number of critical questions about how these actors are making sense ofsuch a complex and volatile media landscape during elections. For instance, how do campaign
communication professionals devise and evaluate their digital electioneering strategies? How dothey map the interconnected relationships between audiences, genres of communication, media platforms, and the field of political party competitors? And what can these assessments tell us about
how campaign practitioners think digital electioneering should be done? Finally, what implications
and potential consequences do these (new) ways of orientation have for democratic discourses incompetitive public spheres?
To begin addressing these questions, we advance an approach from theorizing and research on cognitive “heuristics.” Variously conceptualized as informational shortcuts, rules of thumb, institutional schemas, or logics, scholars have consistently shown that people rely on simple heuristic judgments for decision-making, especially when the conditions for such decisions are insecure and theirresults difficult to assess ex ante (e.g., DiMaggio 1997; Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier 2011; Kahneman 2011). Applied to the current era of political communication, we define digital heuristics as
simple rule-governed judgements based on more or less explicit assumptions about the structuringof different platforms, including the role of underlying algorithms, the nature of their audiences, andstyles or genres of communication that they privilege, that guide the digital campaigning strategies
of campaign practitioners. Conceptualizing and identifying the specific digital heuristics employedby campaign communication professionals can provide unique analytic leverage for understanding
the thinking underlying evolving digital campaigning strategies across platforms, political parties,
and national contexts (c.f., Schäfer 2021). Thus, according to our approach, structural conditions ofcurrent communication environments (such as social media affordances) indirectly - rather thandirectly - influence political actors’ communicative behavior and output through their heuristic perceptions.
Based on these assumptions, we empirically investigate political campaign practitioner accounts
from Germany and the United Kingdom. More specifically, analyzing interviews with twelve communication managers from major German and British political parties about their work on generalelection campaigns in 2017, we identify typical heuristic judgements that are based on the hybrid
and algorithmic characteristics of current communication environments. In addition to detailingthese heuristics, we discuss the normative assumptions that they reveal about how different political
campaigns think political institutions like media and political parties should work and what “good”
political communication should look like.
The paper concludes by considering the political and normative implications of the results. Although we do not evaluate how campaigns actually behave but rather how campaign practitioners
think about their communication behaviors, the results have several implications for the performance of electoral politics and the quality of the democratic discourse. For example, if party com-49

munication managers think that using polarizing language is a necessary prerequisite for successfulpolitical communication on social media platforms, then this might result in respective performances and foster populist communication styles within social media that could also travel to other more
traditional channels within the hybrid media system. Our findings also contribute to recent scholarship on how campaigns are using social media to achieve their electoral ambitions by looking beyond the U.S. case and beyond “data-driven campaigning” (e.g., Anstead 2017; Baldwin-Phillipi
2019; Kreiss et al. 2018).

REFERENCES
1.

Anstead, N. (2017). Data-driven campaigning in the 2015 United Kingdom general election. The International
Journal of Press/Politics, 22(3), 294-313

2.

Baldwin-Philippi, J. (2019). “Data campaigning: between empirics and assumptions.” Internet Policy Review, 8(4):
1-18.

3.

Bennett, L. and B. Pfetsch (2018). Rethinking political communication in a time of disrupted public spheres. Journal of Communication, 68, 243-253.

4.

Chadwick, A. (2013). The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power. Oxford: Oxford UP.

5.

DiMaggio, P. (1997). “Culture and Cognition.” Annual Review of Sociology 23:263–87.

6.

Gigerenzer, Gerd; Gaissmaier, Wolfgang (2011): Heuristic decision making. In: Annual review of psychology 62:
451–482.

7.

Karpf, David (2016). Analytic Activism. Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy. Oxford: Oxford UP.

8.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Penguin.

9.

Kreiss, D., Lawrence, R. G., & McGregor, S. C. (2018). In their own words: Political practitioner accounts of candidates, audiences, affordances, genres, and timing in strategic social media use. Political communication, 35(1), 831.

10. Schäfer, Andreas (2021): Digital heuristics: How parties strategize political communication in hybrid media environments. In: New Media & Society (online first). DOI: 10.1177/14614448211012101

50

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Engaging Users Through Information or Critique?
“Likes” and “shares” for parties on Facebook during the 2019 European
Election campaign
Bene, Márton
Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence
Budapest, Hungary
bene.marton@tk.hu

Ceron, Andrea
Universitá Degli Studi di Milano
Milan, Italy
andrea.ceron@unimi.it

Fenoll, Vicente
University of Valencia
Valencia, Spain
vicente.fenoll@uv.es

Haßler, Jörg
LMU Munich
Munich, Germany
Joerg.Hassler@ifkw.lmu.de

Kruschinski, Simon
Johannes Gutenberg Universität
Mainz, Germany
simon.kruschinski@uni-mainz.de

Larsson, Anders Olof
Kristiania University College
Oslo, Norway
AndersOlof.Larsson@kristiania.no

Magin, Melanie
NTNU
Trondheim, Norway
melanie.magin@ntnu.no

Schlosser, Katharina
LMU Munich
Munich, Germany
Katharina.Schlosser@ifkw.lmu.de

Wurst, Anna-Katharina
LMU Munich
Munich, Germany
Anna-Katharina.Wurst@ifkw.lmu.de

Lilleker, Darren
Bournemouth University
Bournemouth, UK
DLilleker@bournemouth.ac.uk

Maurer, Peter
Universität Trier
Trier, Germanymaurer@uni-trier.de51

KEYWORDS
Facebook; user engagement; populism; negativity; polarization

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.13

52

Even though political communication differs between different country contexts, many scholars argue
that the contemporary political environment overall has become increasingly fragmented and polarizing as it is dominated by divisive ‘hot’ topics, fragmented issue focus, a populist communicationstyle, and heightened negativity (see Bennett & Iyengar, 2008; Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018; Blumler,
2016). These changes are frequently associated with the emergence of social media, which haschanged the structure of the political communication ecosystem by, inter alia, making ordinary citizens’ communicative activities more important in the political information process than ever before(Blumler, 2016; Chadwick, 2017).
Social media in general, and Facebook in particular, have become an increasingly important communication channel for political actors. Although via their Facebook pages political actors directly reach
only rather narrow and already converted voter segments, the network effects of the platform enable
them to indirectly reach much larger audiences (Bene, 2017). If many users engage with their posts
and thereby disseminate party information to their friends, parties can reach an enormous number ofvoters in a peer-mediated way, which is highly impactful in social media contexts (see Anspach,2017). For these reasons, research shows that user engagement is a crucial performance factor inparties’ social media strategy (Kalsnes, 2016; Kreiss et al., 2018).
While user engagement is obviously driven by multiple factors, studies show that the content of messages matters. Therefore, political actors make efforts to adapt to users’ communication and produce
content that triggers user reactions (Ennser-Jedenastic et al., 2021; Kalsnes, 2016). This way citizens’
communication can affect the dominant patterns of our current political communication: if they prefercertain types of topics and styles, these communication tools will probably be more prominent inparties’ communication, as described by the concept of viralization of politics (Bene, 2021; EnnserJedenastic et al., 2021). Consequently, if users engage more with divisive ‘hot’ topics, parties’ own
issues, populist appeals and negative content, this fact could at least partly explain why at present
political communication shows tendencies of fragmentation and polarization.
However, it is still largely unclear what content characteristics of parties’ posts determine how users
engage with the content, and more importantly, what role political contexts play in these processes.
In fact, the emerging literature of this field is dominated by single-country investigations (Bene, 2017;
Heiss et al., 2019; Jost et al, 2020), which makes it difficult to generalize the often-conflicting findings. Further, one can argue that the effects of particular content types are not uniform across different
contexts. First, users from distinct geographical regions with different social and political cultures,challenges and experiences may have varied political content expectations and demands. Second, thestructure of political competition may also shape users’ behaviour, as polarizing content may be more
attractive in an already highly polarized political context.
The present study addresses these research gaps by conducting a content analysis of parties’ (N=68)
posts (N=9,703) on Facebook in 12 European countries during the 2019 European Election campaign.
First, we systematically examine how divisive ‘hot’ and more permanent policy topics, issue ownership, populist appeals, and negativity affect user engagement (Reactions, comments, and shares) on
parties’ central Facebook pages. Second, we show how these effects differ across geographical regions and are moderated by the level of party system polarization.
However, findings only partially support our expectations. Concerning topical aspects of posts, ourfindings are that ‘hot’ topics are not generally successful in provoking user engagement. Particularly53

surprising is the inefficacy of environmental topics, which might be explained by their more specificvocabulary and the fact that problems are often discussed in a less accessible way. In contrast, theother ‘hot’ topic of the campaign, namely immigration, has a strong engagement-provoking potential:
immigration-related content is highly engaged on Facebook. The impact of these ‘hot’ topics differs
across geographical regions. While immigration is a more commented and shared issue in SouthernEastern countries, environmental topics are even less engaged with than in Continental-Northerncountries. More permanent policy topics, however, are not treated in the same way. While the economy is a highly unpopular topic on Facebook, domestic policy tends to be favoured, while labour andsocial policy-related posts are less commented but more shared. Overall, two issues typically put
forward by niche far-right parties, namely immigration and domestic policies (linked with law andorder), proved to be very effective in terms of engagement. Further, there is no issue ownership effecton Facebook user engagement, as parties are not more successful when posting about their own issues
than in the case of other topics, not even in more polarized countries.
Concerning the effects of stylistic characteristics of posts, our findings are that populist and negative
communication is highly effective in increasing the level of user engagement. People are keen to
React and share content that criticizes the elite or refers to the people and are ready to comment on
posts that are about dangerous ‘others’. These effects are uniform across geographical regions, however, anti-elitists and (to a lesser degree) people-centric messages are more effective in more polarized
party systems. Our findings confirm that negativity is the strongest predictor of user engagement,
which seems to be a rather general effect, as it is not moderated by geographical regions or the levelof polarization. Thus, it seems that country factors play a minor role in the patterns of user engagement; regional deviations only matter for ‘hot’ topics, and the level of party system polarization only
matters for populist appeals.
Overall, it seems that due to the growing strategic importance of triggering user engagement, theincreasing presence of populist and negative communication can be at least partly explained by users’
demands on Facebook. All else being equal, parties that communicate their main messages in a more
populistic and negative way can gain larger visibility, and thereby realize the different strategic goalsof their Facebook communication. From this viewpoint, a populist and negative style can be the vehicle by which parties can communicate crucial campaign messages to wider segments of potential
voters in a highly effective, peer-mediated way. Such tendencies do not stay in social media only but
influence political communication as a whole. Thus, if parties follow their users’ needs, that could
increase the overall degree of populism and negativity in political communication, which in turnmight have negative effects on democracy. Immigration seems to have had a similar function during
the 2019 EP elections. At the same time, party-based issue fragmentation cannot be explained byusers’ demands in lack of any significant issue ownership effect.

54

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This publication is part of the work of the junior research group “DigiDeMo” which is funded by
the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts and coordinated by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt). From the part of Márton Bene, the research is funded throughthe Incubator program of the Center for Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd Research Network (project
number: 03013645)

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1.

Anspach, N. M. (2017). The new personal influence: How our Facebook friends influence the news we read. Political Communication, 34(4), 590-606.

2.

Bene, M. (2017). Go viral on the Facebook! Interactions between candidates and followers on Facebook during the
Hungarian general election campaign of 2014. Information, Communication & Society, 20(4), 513-529

3.

Bene, M. (2021). Topics to talk about. The effects of political topics and issue ownership on user engagement with
politicians’ Facebook posts during the 2018 Hungarian general election. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 1-17.

4.

Bennett, W. L., & Iyengar, S. (2008). A new era of minimal effects? The changing foundations of political communication. Journal of Communication, 58(4), 707-731.

5.

Bennett, W. L., & Pfetsch, B. (2018). Rethinking political communication in a time of disrupted public spheres.
Journal of Communication, 68(2), 243-253.

6.

Blumler, J. G. (2016). The fourth age of political communication. Politiques de Communication, 6(1), 19-30.

7.

Chadwick, A. (2017). The hybrid media system: Politics and power. Oxford University Press.

8.

Ennser-Jedenastik, L., Gahn, C., Bodlos, A., & Haselmayer, M. (2021). Does social media enhance party responsiveness? How user engagement shapes parties’ issue attention on Facebook. Party Politics. Online First

9.

Heiss, R., Schmuck, D., & Matthes, J. (2019). What drives interaction in political actors’ Facebook posts? Profileand content predictors of user engagement and political actors’ reactions. Information, Communication & Society,22(10), 1497-1513.

10. Jost, P., Maurer, M., & Hassler, J. (2020). Populism Fuels Love and Anger: The Impact of Message Features on
Users’ Reactions on Facebook. International Journal of Communication, 14, 22.
11. Kalsnes, B. (2016). The social media paradox explained: Comparing political parties’ Facebook strategy versus
practice. Social Media+ Society, 2(2), 2056305116644616
12. Kreiss, D., Lawrence, R. G., & McGregor, S. C. (2018). In their own words: Political practitioner accounts of candidates, audiences, affordances, genres, and timing in strategic social media use. Political Communication, 35(1),
8-31

55

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Following the Beaten Track
A sociology of knowledge perspective on disinformation and its effects on
democratic discourse
Nijmeijer, Rolf
LUISS Guido CarliRome, Italyr.nijmeijer@luiss.it

Schünemann, Wolf
University of Hildesheim
Hildesheim, Germany
wolf.schuenemann@uni-hildesheim.de

König, Tim
University of Hildesheim
Hildesheim, Germany
tim.koenig@uni-hildesheim.de

KEYWORDS
Disinformation; Sociology of knowledge; Public discourse; Foreign information operations

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.14

56

With recent political events, disinformation has emerged as one of the apparent major threats in political debates in highly connected democracies. It looms large in the socio-political debate on thequality of democracy, but also in international security discourse it is perceived as one of the coreelements of (digitally enhanced) information warfare. Thus, it is likely to shape both future measuresof internet governance, in particular content regulation, as well as international conflict.
Research on disinformation has developed techniques to detect false stories and to measure its impact
mostly at the level of individual behaviour (Lazer et al., 2018; Gorrell et al., 2015). Other works havefocussed on the spread of individual pieces of disinformation (Vosoughi & Aral, 2018). Several studies have put emphasis on cross-media effects of disinformation e.g., on election results (Allcott &Gentzkow, 2017; Jamieson, 2018). Despite widespread concerns about the so-called disinformation
order (Bennett &Livinigston, 2018), most empirical studies feed into a growing consensus that there
are no readily available tools to malevolent actors for significantly swaying public opinion throughinformation operations (Rid, 2020; Lanoszka, 2019). However, there is only little knowledge about
structural and persistent effects of disinformation at the societal level (Jungherr & Schroeder, 2021).
To address those concerns and to study the structural dimension of information operations, we propose a theoretical reorientation towards a sociology of knowledge perspective. Thereby, we avoid
individualistic misconceptions of politically relevant knowledge (Schünemann, 2018; Dunn Cavelty,2008). Knowledge goes beyond information. It is not just the sum of single bits of information. Information needs to be interpreted based on social knowledge orders. Therefore, knowledge is not a
feature of an individual or at its disposal but is necessarily constructed and processed in societal
discourses.
Empirical research in the field so far has paid attention mostly to the disruptive novelty of disinformation, or the alleged inaccuracy of particular pieces of information. However, it may be more illuminating to understand successful disinformation campaigns as informational exploits of given vulnerabilities in targeted discursive formations. Instead of expecting disinformation to change public
opinion, we conceive it as strategically confirming embedded social knowledge orders. For example,
disinformation campaigns frequently propagate various salient and sensitive narratives simultaneously, which are often mutually contradictory, but share an inflammatory nature (Bradshaw & Howard, 2019). We hypothesize that information operations utilise and reinforce pre-existing issues andfault lines in a society to maximise disruptive effects. Such a revised conception might help to explain
the heterogeneous set of actors and motivations behind disinformation campaigns within and acrosscountries, it can improve attribution assessments based on a cui-bono-logic and would help to bettergrasp the catalytic effects of attentional mechanisms in (digital) media ecosystems.
This paper empirically tests the aforementioned hypothesis through a thorough analysis of corpora ofnews articles from Germany and France published between 1 January 2019 and 30 June 2019. These
dates comprise the culmination and aftermath of the 2019 European elections campaign, which has
been identified as a prime target for foreign actors to conduct large-scale disinformation campaigns(European Parliament Resolution 2019/2810(RSP), 2019). Since it is the objective of this paper to
identify the ebb-and-flow of a disinformation campaign, and how it relates to public discourse, thesuspected disinformation corpus is collected from Russia Today (RT). This news outlet has been
identified as one arm of the Russian influence apparatus abroad, which includes disinformation operations (Elswah & Howard, 2020). RT is a particularly useful case to study due to its presence inmultiple countries and multilingual content. This allows for comparisons on country- and language-57

level, which will help in identifying any potential country-specific features of disinformation campaigns. The two countries were chosen because in comparative studies (EUvsDisinfo, 2021) they
appeared as the main targets of information operations attributed to Russia. Moreover, there is a German and French version of RT available. It seems particularly illuminating to assess disinformation
campaigns in non-Anglophone countries, since much of the existing literature has already covered
the latter extensively. In order to gather a representative sample of mainstream news media, which
also serves as a representation of the respective general public discourse, we built corpora with news
articles from one regular newspaper and one tabloid newspaper: Die Welt and Bild for Germany, andLe Figaro and France Soir for France. This yields a dataset that we think is both manageable andsufficiently representative for the media landscapes in both countries.
The articles used in the dataset were scraped from the German and French websites of RT, as well asfrom the France Soir website, while the articles from Die Welt, Bild and Le Figaro were downloaded
from LexisNexis. These datasets are curated and analysed using R tools for text-mining. We use
Structural Topic Modelling for our analysis, as it allows to estimate covariate effects on topic distribution for both the various news outlets, as well as the timeline in which trends and/or clusters of
topics emerge. Coming from our social-constructivist perspective, we expect RT information operations to align to socio-culturally specific patterns of public discourse. Therefore, we expect crosscountry variation in topical orientation. Moreover, as to the temporal variation, we expect RT to ‘follow’ the newspapers on divisive topics, rather than ‘planting the seeds’ for a dominant topic. We
hypothesise that RT will do so in an amplifying manner, using more galvanising language than thequality newspapers in the dataset.
Preliminary findings from the German case study suggest that RT stands out most from the mainstream newspapers through its substantial coverage of issues that are salient and likely to evoke strong
emotions. Topics that RT covers more extensively than its more mainstream counterparts include
migration, migrant criminality, Brexit, alternative perspectives on politics and Russia. Conversely,
less emotionally charged topics, such as those related to finance, health and party politics, receive farless attention from RT than from mainstream news outlets. These findings are commensurate withthe expectation that disinformation latches onto potentially disruptive issues present within the society that it targets. Further analysis on topical orientation and publication timeline should give moreinsight into the relationship between cases news outlets. These findings will be presented in the final
paper, combined with an assessment of how they may or may not fit within the discourse of theirrespective societies.

58

REFERENCES
1.

Allcott, H., Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 31 (2), 211–36.

2.

Bennett, W. L., Livingston, S. (2018). The disinformation order: Disruptive communication and the decline ofdemocratic institutions. European Journal of Communication, 33(2), 122–139.

3.

Bradshaw, S., Howard, P. N. (2019). The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social
Media Manipulation. Working Paper, 3. Oxford: Project on Computational Propaganda.
4. Dunn Cavelty, M. (2008). Cyber-security and threat politics. US efforts to secure the information age. London:
Routledge.
5. Elswah, M., Howard P. N. (2020). “Anything That Causes Chaos”: The Organizational Behavior of Russia Today(RT). Journal of Communication, 70 (5), 623–45.
6. European Parliament (2019). Resolution on foreign electoral interference and disinformation in national and European democratic processes 2019/2810(RSP). Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-92019-0031_EN.html.
7. EUvsDisinfo (2021). Vilifying Germany; Wooing Germany. Available at: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/villifying-germany-wooing-germany/.
8. Gorrell, G., Bakir, M. E., Roberts, I., Greenwood, M. A., Iavarone, B., Bontcheva, K. (2019). Partisanship, Propaganda and Post-Truth Politics: Quantifying Impact in Online Debate. Journal of Web Science, 7.
9. Jamieson, K. H. (2018). Cyberwar. How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President - What We Don't,
Can't, and Do Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
10. Jungherr, A., Schroeder. R. (2021). Disinformation and the Structural Transformations of the Public Arena: Addressing the Actual Challenges to Democracy. Social Media + Society, 7 (1), 1-13.
11. Lanoszka, A. (2019). Disinformation in International Politics. European Journal of International Security, 4 (2),
227–48.
12. Lazer, D. M. J., Baum, M. A., Benkler, Y., Berinsky, A. J., Greenhill, K. M., Menczer, F., Metzger, M. J., Nyhan,
B., Pennycook, G., Rothschild, D., Schudson, M., Sloman, S. A., Sunstein, C. R., Thorson, E. A., Watts, D. J.,
Zittrain, J. L. (2018). The science of fake news. Science, 359 (6380), 1094-1096.
13. Rid, T. (2020). Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux.
14. Schünemann, W. J. (2018). SKAD analysis of European multi-level political debates. In R. Keller, A., Hornidge,
K., Schünemann, W. J. (Eds.). The sociology of knowledge approach to discourse: Investigating the politics ofknowledge and meaning-making. New York: Routledge, (pp. 91–111).
15. Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., Aral, S. (2018). The Spread of True and False News Online. Science, 359 (6380), 1146–51.

59

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Fostering Inclusion Online
Can online instruments compensate the elitist bias ofrepresentative democracy?
Neyer, Jürgen
Europa-Universität ViadrinaFrankfurt (Oder), Germany
neyer@europa-uni.de

Worschech, Susann
Europa-Universität ViadrinaFrankfurt (Oder), Germany
worschech@europa-uni.de

KEYWORDS
Inclusion; Online participation; Local Politics; smart city

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.15

60

What is the role of technology in fostering local democracy? How has technology changed our expectations about the proper sites of representation, and the modes of citizen participation in selfgovernance? Can we even expect a technologically re-empowered local democracy to compensate
for structural problems of recent multi-level governance democracy?
This paper starts with a diagnosis of structural problems of modern representative democracy. It explains the practice of multi-level governance as a structural and well-justified feature of democracy.
Multi-level governance has a dark side, however. It implies long chains of representation, severely
limited relevance of individual interventions, an elitist bias and a lack of citizen participation. “Theflaw in the pluralist heaven”, as Schattschneider has famously argued, “is that the heavenly chorus
sings with a strong upper-class accent". Multi-level governance is thus not only relevant for European
and global governance but also for understanding growing civic frustration. Even complementing
representative forms of governance with more direct democratic institutions does not solve the problem. Empirical evidence underlines that citizens who participate in direct democratic initiatives areon average relatively highly educated, older and politically or civically active. They have often been
involved on previous occasions and form a group of participants with a low degree of diversity (Michels/ De Graaf 2017: 877). Much of the recently discussed “democratic regression” (Schäfer/ Zürn
2021) is a product of this twin problem.
The paper combines the recent literature on smart cities with the suggestion that digital instruments
might be helpful for overcoming the twin problem. The easy availability of online technologies promises to provide for new forms of local participation and ownership, and thus improve the overall
legitimacy of democracy. Digital technologies are identified in the literature with innovative instruments for the making of local communities, for strengthening the direct involvement of citizens in
the implementation of local budgets, and of providing additional access to decision-makers. They areconnected to








increasing transparency and better opportunities for retrieving information;
promoting inclusion by giving social actors (especially marginalized ones) better opportunities to contribute to the formation of public opinion outside institutionalized channels andwithout the filtering function of traditional media;
opening up of alternative opportunities for participation, allowing people to be more involvedin political decision-making processes over the Internet;
strengthening the responsiveness of political actors by easier access to dialogue with representatives on social media;
lowering the costs of communication, association, and participation
stimulating processes of online community building via connective action

The paper reports in its third part preliminary findings from a participatory online process of setting
up a smart city strategy for Frankfurt (Oder). The process is conducted in spring and summer 2021,
i.e. under conditions of social distancing necessitated by the pandemic. It entails interviews with morethan 50 local experts in various aspects relevant for local governance, a full-day digital town hallmeeting for all citizens in June, 2021 and a systematic analysis of German smart cities’ initiatives toaddress the concerns of those most vulnerable in society, i.e. kids in very low income households.

61

This process is interesting both in itself and with regard to its outcome. A purely online process highlights many of the strengths and difficulties involved with organizing digital democracy. Importantstrengths are the

easy availability of experts. Video conferencing allows conducting interviews and organizing
meetings with an efficiency unknown in analog times. It is alsoless difficult to provide information to all participants and interested parties,
to organize discussions among experts andto reach out to partners across borders.

Online interviews have proven far less adequate for reaching out to those who are less well-off andliving in neighborhoods with low levels of income. Representative structures are difficult to identify,
often lack the necessary technological instruments and knowledge for meaningful interaction or are,if equipped with proper resources, themselves part of the elite. In order to overcome this elitist biasof representative structures and to bypass the flaw of equating direct democracy with inclusionary
policy, the research project launches in its second empirical part a large-scale online survey with
6.000 households mainly living in social housing.
The paper will present the survey and discuss its likeliness to

overcome elitism in participation
give voice to those who are excluded by formal structures of representationand stimulate republican attitudes

The paper will conclude with a preliminary – and cautious - assessment of the empirical findings ofthe project and infer some suggestions about the conditions under which local online instruments canalleviate the legitimacy deficit of representative multi-level democracy.

LITERATURE
1.

Fung, A. (2015). Putting the public back into governance: The challenges of citizen participation in the future.
Public Administration Review 75(4): 513–522.

2.

Klijn, E.-H., Koppenjan, J.F.M. (2002). Rediscovering the citizens: New roles for politicians in interactive policy-making. In: McLaverty P (ed.) Public Participation and Innovations in Community Governance. Aldershot:
Ashgate, 141–164.

3.

Kübler, D., Rochat, P.E., Woo, S. Y., van der Heiden, N. (2020): Strengthen governability rather than deepen
democracy: Why local governments introduce participatory governance. International Review of Administrative Sciences 86(3), 409–426.

4.

Michels, A., De Graaf, L. (2017). Examining citizen participation: local participatory policymaking and democracy revisited. Local Government Studies 43(6), 875-881.

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Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

For Health of The Nation, Unite Online
Medical controversies, civil disobedience and the future of democracy inthe light of expert authority crisis

Góralska, Magdalena
Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology
University of Warsaw
Department of Management in Networked and Digital SocietiesKoźmiński University
Warsaw, Poland
maniagoralska@gmail.com

KEYWORDS
information overload; digital ethnography; expert authority crisis

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.16

63

Digitalization of knowledge means that Kazimierz can open a browser, than a search engine, type in“rush on an forearm”, go to Google Pictures and look for similarities with what his grandson developed overnight. Moreover, it means that his wife, Beata, who is equally skeptical of the publichealthcare system, can pick up her smartphone, go to Facebook, and ask one of the many healthadvice groups, what might have caused the rush, posting pictures and detailed descriptions. “Doctors
don’t have time for patients, they just cure effects, not the cause”, she says, “I want the whole truth,
I want the facts”. Across the Polish-speaking Facebook, complementing the already popular healthrelated portals, blogs, forums, as well as Wikipedia, various self-help groups grow in number andsize. Some are in favor of conventional medicine, but many are not, pointing out all those “inconvenient truths” of the “health industry”, once hidden and now finally known to people – thanks to theInternet. They can be as big as having hundred thousand members, or as small to only count couple
thousands. Either way, their popularity I have observed over the years, skyrocketed in the pandemic.
New groups emerged, old expanded to incorporate a new wave of members, people whose trouble inaccessing healthcare, or getting care that satisfies their needs grew exponentially since the late winterof the 2020.
In Poland over the past decade the Internet has become the place to go, when seeking health advice.
Like elsewhere across the globe, it has also become a source of information on the malfunctions of
both, the healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry. While old media have their gatekeepers andtheir agendas, the Web, even though being fundamentally in private ownership, creates networked
spaces where various Internet users can, in various forms, to various degrees, and on various levelsof anonymity, prod-use Internet’s content (Bruns, 2016). It became an open-ended learning place,and a place of encounters, where Beata can meet others, who also seek health advice across not only
new medical information outlets or Wikipedia, but also within social networking sites such as Facebook or Instagram, social news agreggators such as Reddit, or group instant messaging apps such as
WhatsApp, Telegram or Messanger. This paper builds on a long-term ethnographic fieldwork, thattook place in years 2016-2020 across the Polish-speaking Internet-scape, inquiring into networked
health activism within Internet’s networked publics, that those social media constitute (boyd, 2011;
Papacharissi, 2002). In Poland, they revolve around Facebook, and this platform, was my primary
focus of the study. Relationships that take place within those spaces, are what I have come to call the
new public care.
The new public care is a concept that captures relations of advice, support, and care, that materialize
through affordances, and communication infrastructures, of the social media that mediate the information exchange. It describes both the self-care and community-care of Internet users, as it is usually
the self-interests that makes help-seekers become members of such care communities; some of them
repay the support received, sharing their knowledge – experiences, or information obtain other way,
through online searchers, doctor consultations, friend’s stories. The new public care as a concept has
three folds to it.
First, there is the care, the same one that makes up the definition of the modern healthcare system.
Those informal health advice groups and networks, whether big or small, provide a safe space to ask
questions, seek opinion, reference, solution, providing swift answers from other group members, nonexperts, lay public, patients. Bottom-up, grass-root organized, they provide what malfunctions andinefficiencies of the public healthcare system cannot. On the one hand, it’s the quick advice of what
to do, where to look further, what to Google. On the other, however, it’s attention, often extensive,

64

emotional support, and a remedy for the feeling of hopelessness, desperation or despair they come tothose groups with, after being, for various reasons disappointed or confused by the public or private
healthcare, or the biomedicine as such.
Second, those care practices take place in what Zizi Papacharissi have called the public sphere of theDigital Age – on the Internet. Informal health advice networks provide an ad to the national healthcare
system, that is used by the majority of the society, as every Polish citizen is eligible. It’s primarymalfunction are the waiting lines, that in the case of more advanced health problems can make apatient wait for years. While there isn’t much difference in the quality of service, private healthcare
offers no lines, but at a substantially higher cost. Networked publics across social media are the publicsphere where grassroots health advice tries to fill in for the failures of the state.
Third, the new public care that relays on knowledge exchange between individuals, creates a hive
mind repository of knowledge that provides information from outside of the biomedical hegemony.
Alongside YouTube and various webpages, Facebook plays a crucial role in being the main provider
of information on the short-comings of the so-called “health industry”, that wouldn’t be found inmainstream media, except in a few left-wing or right-wing niche magazines. While experts are (usually) well aware of the “imperfections” in their respective fields, the so-called “lay public” expresses
feelings of unease, confusion, uncertainty, fear, and anger across the cyberspace, often turning theirinterest towards alternative health practices, seeking remedies the biomedicine has so far failed toprovide them with.
Beata in her post to a Facebook group that brings together Internet users with various stands on biomedicine, learned that her grandson could have had an allergic reaction to food, clothes, chemicals,
animals, plants, but also stress. She received advice on home made cures to take care of the rush, andbased on the comments under her post, she decided to convince her daughter to take Jaś to see aallergologist, an expert in allergy detection, privately of course. When she first joined the group she
was at first overwhelmed with the stories she read, shared news articles that talk about the dark sideof the pharmaceutical industry, medical mistakes, corruption in healthcare, and that the scientificprocess of knowledge-making is a work-in-progress, with many more unknowns than “factsWhilethe ethnographic methods strength lays in choosing quality over quantity, a scale and sheer numberof various grass-root health advice places across the Web seem to suggest a growing need for a reformthat would change medical practices more radically than just fixing waiting lines. The democratization of the access to information that the digital age supposedly brought, allowing Beata and others
to seek information on their own, having only their habitus, cultural and social capital as points ofreference on where to go, made the expert authority crisis of the era of reflexive modernization more
visible (Beck i in., 1994). The Web is collectively produced, hence, to that seemingly infinite repository of information anyone can contribute. The Internet is full of various forms and kids ofknowledge, some of which are not in line with academic sciences, being not evidence-based.
Annemarie Mol in her concept of body multiple, points to complexity of bodily experiences of sickness that make diagnosis and treatment difficult (Mol, 2002). Many of my interviewees talk about
their reasons for seeking advice in health advice groups as being more trusting of experiences ofothers, even if they recommend cures that are not approved by the hegemonious biomedicine. As theyfelt unheard and misunderstood by medical doctors, they decided to take matter of their health in theirown hands, with Internet repositories helping them to perform their agency. In modern democracies
experts are those who inform public policies – experts understood as professionals, individuals who
65either through their experience or academic education gained extensive knowledge of a given topic(Collins & Evans, 2008). With power relations around knowledge categories changing, how should
the democratic state address that the demos is multiple when it comes to their healthcare choices?
Bringing in examples that include the controversial anti-vaccination movement, but also the Lyme
disease, gluten intolerance, and Hashimoto disease, I argue that the future of healthcare in a democratic society must address the ambiguity of expertise.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This study was funded by the research grant nr 0252/DIA/2016/45, nr OK – 697 by the Polish Ministry of Science and Education.

REFERENCES
1.

Beck, U., Giddens, A., & Lash, S. (1994). Reflexive modernization: Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modernsocial order. Stanford University Press.

2.

boyd, danah. (2011). Social Network Sites as Networked Publics. W Z. Papacharissi (Red.), A Networked Self.
Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. Routledge.

3.

Bruns, A. (2016). Prosumption, Produsage. W K. B. Jensen, E. W. Rothenbuhler, J. D. Pooley, & R. T. Craig (Red.),The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy (1. wyd.). Wiley.

4.

Collins, H., & Evans, R. (2008). Rethinking Expertise. University of Chicago Press.

5.

Mol, A. (2002). The Body Multiple. Ontology in Medical Practice. Duke University Press Books.

6.

Papacharissi, Z. (2002). The Virtual Sphere. The Internet as a Public Sphere. New Media & Society, 4(1), 9–27.

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Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

The Making of Citizens
Democracy and children’s rights in digital spheres
Kaesling, Katharina
Universität Bonn
Bonn, Germany
kaesling@uni-bonn.de

KEYWORDSUN Convention on the Rights of the Child; fundamental rights and democratic order; children’s communication in digital spheres; civic (dis)engagement; self-experimentation; social networks; converging media landscapes; updated interpretation of children’s rights; balancing protective and participatory rights

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.17

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1

BALANCING A RISK-BASED NARRATIVE OF CHILDREN’SPARTICIPATION ONLINE

Emerging digital spheres hold enormous potential and risks for children, both of which are increasingly understood and outlined. As many new phenomena, they have triggered discursive polarization.
Generally, the participation of children in online environments is characterized by a risk-based narrative, emphasizing the dangers of digital media for the younger generations. Even in scholarly literature, those risks have been found grossly overstated (Holmes, 2009).
Beyond the legal realm, children’s rights have functioned as a counterpoint to this narrative. In particular, they have served to formulate children’s needs in a digital world from a socio-psychologicaland educationalist point of view (Livingstone, 2014; Kutscher & Bouillon, 2018). All around theworld, children’s rights are guaranteed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The
CRC, despite turning 35 years old this year, holds great potential for the implementation of children’s
rights in digital spheres (Kaesling, 2021; Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2021). Notably, theCRC recognizes children as rightholders with individual agency (Dethloff & Maschwitz, 2012),
which extends to their participation as independent actors in online environments (Graziani, 2012).
Greater emphasis should be put on children’s rights to participate in digital communication with aview to its importance in the making of democratic citizens.

2

COMMUNICATION AS LIFEBLOOD OF A DEMOCRACY

Communication is the lifeblood of a democracy and a constitutional state (Hoffmann-Riem, 2002).
The freedom of expression as guaranteed by Article 5 GG (Basic Law) was taken up by the Parliamentary Council in 1949 in order to safeguard political freedom against any paternalism (HoffmannRiem, 2002). The German Constitutional Court considers freedom of expression to be constitutive ofthe liberal-democratic order (BVerfG, 1958 and 1995). Public debate of citizens is seen as a vitalelement of democracy. Children generally have the same fundamental rights as adults. The German
Constitution does not yet include a specific section on children’s rights.
The CRC, ratified by Germany in 1992, contains a number of children’s rights with particular importance for communication in the digital age. Article 13 CRC establishes the right to freedom of
expression, which includes freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds,
regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any othermedia of the child’s choice. Article 13 (2) CRC allows for certain restrictions of the exercise of thatright, but only if they are provided by law and are necessary for the attainment of the aims mentioned
there, such as the respect of the rights or reputations of others or the protection of national security,
public order, public health or morals. For example, limitations on the creation and consumption ofuser-generated content on social networks need to be legally justified with regard to these standards.
According to Article 17 CRC, State Parties recognize the important function of the mass media andshall ensure that the child has access to information and material from a diversity of national andinternational sources. Article 31 (1) CRC contains rights to rest and leisure and to participate freely
in cultural life and the arts. Similar to what the German Constitutional Court has stated with regard
to Article 5 GG, children’s participatory rights like the freedom of expression have to interpreted withregard to their purposes and links to democratic orders.

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3

CHILDREN’S CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AND POLITICAL CONCEPTS

The inclusion of children in online sociality is also a question of civic education. Internet-based communication can counteract disengagement of young people from public life (Carpini, 2000; Benkler,
2006; Gottlieb-Robles & Larson, 2006; Bennett, 2007). Digital spheres offer opportunities for civic
expression and participation (Shah et al., 2005; Kenski & Jomini Stroud, 2006). Long before children
turn into voters, they form notions of normativity, authority, and justice. Children’s political concepts
develop at an early stage through everyday experiences (Cullingford, 1992). They thus grasp conceptsof fundamental rights, autonomy, and democracy (Helwig/Turiel, 2002). A substantive amount of
their identity experimentation takes place online as part of the socialization with media (Schulz,2010). Social media offers a rich environment for creative self-expression. Digital spheres become
an important space for youth to develop and express their political selves (Lane, 2020).
Communication in the digital age encompasses not only messaging services, but also content creation
on social media for the public or a selected audience (Thimm, 2017; Dittler & Hoyer, 2014). Endusers interact privately and publicly, giving rise to online group exchanges and community building(Neumann-Braun, 2011). The use of social networking sites is so integrated into young people's everyday lives that it is practically out of the question for young people to reject this form of communication (Authenrieth et al, 2011). In the converging media landscapes with regular multitasking, multimedia theme repertoires are part of the everyday identity practices of young adults (Kleinen-von Königslöw & Förster, 2016).

4

INTERPRETING AND BALANCING OF CHILDREN’S RIGHTS

Children’s rights are human rights, but with special protections, which are warranted by the fact that
their rights are particularly easy to encroach upon, in particular in the name of protection and parental
responsibility. When interpreting and balancing children’s rights, in particular those of the CRC, links
between participatory rights, public debate and civic engagement and democracy have to be considered. Consequences for the application of children’s rights are threefold:(1) Firstly, these links underline that children’s participatory rights are equally important as protective rights. Purely risk-based approaches to children’s online participation do not sufficiently take into account the magnitude of online sociality and its political dimensions in the
21st century.
(2) Protective measures, destined to shield children from harm associated with their activities indigital spheres, have to be seen as limitations on children’s participatory rights. As such, theirlawfulness depends on their justification with regard to their purpose. Participatory rights suchas those guaranteed in Article 13 and 31 CRC therefore set limits to regulation in a number oflegal areas including platform regulation, family law and tort liability, in particular with regard to copyright violations.
(3) Thirdly, the interpretation of key terms has to be updated. In particular, characteristics of digital media landscapes have to be taken into account. The CRC already unequivocally extends
freedom of expression to all types of media (Article 13 CRC). The interpretation of the term
“mass media” in Article 17 needs to be extended beyond traditional media categories in thelight of the convergent multi-media theme repertoires.

69

5

REFERENCES

1.

Autenrieth, U., Bänziger, A., Rohde, W., Schmidt, J. (Eds.) (2011). Gebrauch und Bedeutung von Social Network
Sites im Alltag junger Menschen. Ein Ländervergleich zwischen Deutschland und der Schweiz. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft.

2.

Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.

3.

Bennett, W. L. (Ed.) (2008). Civic Life Online - Learning How Digital Media Can Engage Youth, Cambridge: MIT
Press.

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BVerfG (German Constitutional Court) (1958). Urteil vom 15. 1. 1958 - 1 BvR 400/57. NJW 1958, 257 – 259.

5.

BVerfG (German Constitutional Court) (1995). Beschluss vom 10.10.1995 - 1 BvR 1476/91, 1 BvR 1980/91, 1
BvR 102/92 & 1 BvR 221/92. NJW 1995, 3303 – 3310.

6.

Carpini, M. (2000). Gen.com: Youth, Civic Engagement, and the New Information Environment. Political Communication, 17 (4), 341 – 349.

7.

Committee on the Rights of the Child (2021). General comment No. 25 on children’s rights in relation to the digital
environment. CRC/C/GC/25.

8.

Cullingford, C. (1992). Children and Society - Children's Attitudes to Politics and Power. London: Cassell Publishing.

9.

Dethloff, N., Maschwitz, A. (2012). Kinderrechte in Europa – wo stehen wir?. Familie, Partnerschaft, Recht, 2012,
190 – 194.

10. Dittler, U., Hoyer, M. (Eds.). (2014). Social Network - Die Revolution der Kommunikation: Kundenkommunikation, Facebook-Freundschaften, digitale Demokratie und virtuelle Shitstorms unter medienpsychologischer undmediensoziologischer Perspektiven. München: Kopaed.
11. Gottlieb-Robles, B., Larson, G.O. (2004). Youth as E-Citizens: Engaging the Digital Generation. Washington DC:
American University.
12. Graziani, L. (2012). Les enfants et internet: La participation des jeunes à travers les réseaux sociaux. Journal dudroit des jeunes, 7/2012, 36 – 45.
13. Helwig, C. C., Turiel, E. (2002). Civil liberties, autonomy, and democracy: Children's perspective. International
Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 25 (3), 253 – 270.
14. Hoffmann-Riem, W. (2002). Kommunikationsfreiheiten - Kommentierungen zu Artikel 5 Abs. 1 und 2 sowie Artikel 8 GG. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft.
15. Holmes, J. (2009). Myths and Missed Opportunities: Young People’s Not So Risky Use of Online Communication.
Information, Communication & Society, 12 (8), 1174 – 1196.
16. Kaesling, K. (2021). Children’s Digital Rights: Realizing the Potential of the CRC. In: Laufer-Ukeles, P., Marrus,
E. (Eds.). Children’s Rights and Interests: 30 Years After the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. London:
Routledge, forthcoming.
17. Kenski, K., Jomini Stroud N. (2006). Connections Between Internet Use and Political Efficacy, Knowledge, andParticipation. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 50 (2), 173 – 192.
18. Kleinen-von Königslöw, K., Förster, K. (2016). Multi-media theme repertoires in theeveryday identity practices ofyoung adults. Communications, 41 (4), 375 – 398.
19. Kutscher, N., Bouillon, R. (2018). Kinder. Bilder. Rechte. Persönlichkeitsrechte von Kindern im Kontext der digitalen Mediennutzung in der Familie, Berlin: Schriftenreihe des Deutschen Kinderhilfswerkes e.V., Heft 4.
20. Lane, D. S. (2020). In Search of the Expressive Citizen: Citizenship Norms and Youth Political Expression on Social Media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 2020 (84), Special Issue, 257 – 283.
21. Livingstone, S. (2014). Children's digital rights: a priority. Intermedia, 42 (4/5), 20 – 24.
22. Neumann-Braun, K. (Ed.). (2011). Freundschaft und Gemeinschaft im Social Web. Bildbezogenes Handeln undPeergroup-Kommunikation auf Facebook & Co. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft.

7023. Schulz, I. (2010). Mediatisierte Sozialisation im Jugendalter - Kommunikative Praktiken und Beziehungsnetze im
Wandel. Berlin: VISTAS Verlag.
24. Shah, D., Jaeho, C., Eveland, W., Kwak, N. (2005). Information and Expression in a Digital Age Modeling Internet
Effects on Civic Participation. Communication Research, 32 (5), 531 – 565.
25. Thimm, C. (2017). Digitale Werteordnung: Kommentieren, kritisieren, debattieren im Netz. Forschung und Lehre,
12/2017, 1062 – 1063.

71

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

The New Face(s) of News
Journalistic intermediaries in the YouTube universe

Lichtenstein, Dennis
Austrian Academy of Sciences
Vienna, Austria
dennis.lichtenstein@oeaw.ac.at

Herbers, Martin R.
Zeppelin Universität
Friedrichshafen, Germany
martin.herbers@zu.de

Bause, HalinaHeinrich-Heine-Universität
Düsseldorf, Germany
halina.bause@phil.hhu.de

KEYWORDS
YouTube; Modernization of Journalism; Journalistic Role Orientations

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.18

72

In today’s “high-choice media environment” (van Aelst et al., 2017) transmission and reception ofpolitical news increasingly shifts from the legacy media to new participatory online media (Newman,2018), resulting in new forms of political reporting and challenging established forms of mediateddemocracy (Blumler, 2013). On social network sites, activists and extremists in concert with commercial and political influencers compete for attention, clicks and users’ support. In addition, newintermediaries emerge, which are particularly influential among the digital natives (Freberg et al.,2011). They converge the coverage of political and societal issues with the sociable and affective
cultures of social media, by making use of personalization, emotions, humor, and opinion (Hurcombe,
Burgess & Harrington, 2021; Miltner & Highfield, 2017; Highfield, 2016; Shifman, 2013).
Over the last decade, journalism scholars have started paying more attention to journalistic practices
on the video-sharing platform YouTube (e.g., Djerf-Pierre, Lindgren & Budinski, 2019;
Peer & Ksiazek, 2011). YouTube is a hybrid medium in which TV’s audiovisual content and theparticipatory culture of social media converge (Burgess & Green, 2018). Whereas the great majority
of YouTubers publish entertainment or lifestyle videos (Bärtl, 2018; Frühbrodt & Floren, 2019),
journalistic YouTubers produce and distribute content that can be described as news. They combine
the originally text-based practice of blogging about societal and political issues with audiovisualpresentations, YouTube’s community culture. Additionally, they deal with social media’s interactive
and algorithm-driven logic. Journalistic YouTubers must be considered for shaping politicalknowledge and opinion formation among the digital natives and to complement or supplement traditional media outlets in their functions. Even though knowledge on these new intermediaries is crucial
to understanding their role in modern democracies (Pfetsch, Löblich & Eilders, 2018; Schweiger,2017), research on their motivation, role orientations, and their ability to fulfill normative functionsof the public sphere (e.g., information or orientation) is scarce (Wegener, 2019).
This paper analyses journalistic YouTubers in Germany, considering their journalistic role orientations in this new media environment. Journalistic role orientations entail normative and cognitive
dimensions, and the analysis of such orientations reveals the dynamics involved in the constructionof journalism’s identity and its boundaries (Hanitzsch & Vos, 2017). In Germany, public service
broadcasters and other public institutions fund several journalistic YouTube formats with financial
and editorial resources in order to provide quality content to younger audiences in the funk network(funk, 2020). Yet, some intermediaries are associated with commercial media networks or funded
independently. In order to gain explorative insights in the way the new intermediaries on YouTube
perceive their role in political communication and how YouTubers within and without the funk network differ in their role orientation, we conducted 16 qualitative semi-structured interviews withjournalistic YouTubers from which 11 YouTubers are integrated in the funk network. We identified
journalistic YouTubers in a combination of an automatic search and snowball system and checked
for journalistic qualities of their content, including YouTubers only who provide a recent, relevant
and rather universal spectrum of topics (Neuberger & Nuernbergk, 2010; Wegener, 2019). The average age in our sample was 32 years, ranging between 22 and 35 years, with two outliers at the agesof 40 and 58. Follower counts ranged from 19,000 to 1.3 million, with an average of 323,031 subscribers. We analyzed the data following a grounded theory-based approach, through a consistentcoding system (Pentzold, Bischof & Heise, 2018), identifying similarities and contrasts in the roleconceptions.

73

Most of the interviewed YouTubers have at least some experiences in the practical work as mass
media journalists and identify with journalistic norms and ethics. Results indicate that our respondents
identify the most with monitorial role orientations and strive to disseminate information, contributeto opinion formation, and enhance political participation. In difference to what is known about mass
media journalists (Steindl, Lauerer & Hanitzsch, 2017) they have a strong accent on the motivationto activate users on the basis of information and opinion. They strive to inform their young audiences
in a user-friendly way, to provide an overview on issues and to stimulate engagement. They seek tomotivate their audience to search for further information and facilitate discussion. In addition, ourparticipants reported that they ‘close gaps’ in legacy media’s reporting. This refers mainly to missing
representations of young people and minorities in society, and secondly to the younger perspectives
on current affairs and societal issues. They further employ critical positions, which they perceive asotherwise excluded from legacy media’s reporting. Yet, they report to select their presented issues
along their personal lines of interest and highlight the need for entertainment. Citing entertaining
journalism and a high responsiveness to audience inquiries as the future of journalism and politicalcommunication in a digital world, they promote different approaches to reporting. Addressing the
logic of social media, they highlight opinion-heavy or even provocative content to foster distribution
and ignite further discussion, instead of legacy media’s neutral reporting.
Moreover, they believe that their work contributes to the modernization of journalism by pushingjournalism towards younger target groups, entertaining presentation styles, and a strong focus on
audience interactions. Accordingly, they emphasize the benefits of a “generation-specific” journalism
which they perceive, however, as a complement rather as a substitute to mass media journalism. Finally, funk YouTubers are incorporated into professional editorial structures and must follow qualitative and quantitative success criteria. While the funk membership enables for a strong audiencemanagement, regarding content production, editorial support is perceived as a “reasonable limitation”
and as a driver for professionalization. In sum, our findings reveal a “normalized revolution” (Klotz,2019): while public broadcasters benefit from young YouTubers acting as a gateway to a younger
audience, the YouTubers integrated in the funk network profit from the resources and professional
standards of media organizations.

74

REFERENCES
1.

Bärtl, M. (2018). YouTube Channels, Uploads and Views. Convergence: The International Journal of ResearchInto New Media Technologies 24 (1), 16–32. doi:10.1177/1354856517736979

2.

Blumler, J. G. (2013). The Fourth Age of Political Communication. Keynote Address at Freie Universität Berlin,
12. September 2013. Berlin.

3.

Burgess, J., Green, J. (2018). YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity.

4.

Djerf-Pierre, M., Lindgren, M., Budinski, M. A. (2019). The Role of Journalism on YouTube: Audience Engagement with ‘Superbug’ Reporting. Media and Communication 7 (1), 235–247. doi:10.17645/mac.v7i1.1758

5.

Freberg, K., Graham, K., McGaughey, K., & Freberg, L. A. (2011). Who are the Social Media Influencers? A
Study of Public Perceptions of Personality. Public Relations Review, 37 (1), 90–102.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2010.11.001

6.

Frühbrodt, L., Floren, A. (2019). Unboxing YouTube. Im Netzwerk der Profis und Profiteure. OBS-Arbeitsheft 98.
Frankfurt a. M.: Otto Brenner Stiftung.

7.

funk (2020). Berichtszeitraum 01.10.2018–30.09.2020 https://presse.funk.net/pressemeldung/funk-bericht-2020/

8.

Hanitzsch, T., Vos, T. P. (2017). Journalistic Roles and the Struggle Over Institutional Identity: The Discursive
Constitution of Journalism. Communication Theory 27 (2), 115–135. doi:10.1111/comt.12112

9.

Highfield, T. (2016). Social Media and Everyday Politics. Cambridge, Malden: Polity.

10. Hurcombe, E., Burgess, J., & Harrington, S. (2021). What’s Newsworthy About “Social News”? Characteristics
and Potential of an Emerging Genre. Journalism, 22 (2), 378–394. doi:10.1177/1464884918793933
11. Klotz, R. J. (2019). Deleveraging Creative Capital: A Decade of YouTube Campaigning. International Journal of
E-Politics 10 (1), 1–11. doi:10.4018/IJEP.2019010101
12. Miltner, K. M., & Highfield, T. (2017). Never Gonna GIF You up: Analyzing the Cultural Significance of the Animated GIF. Social Media + Society, o. Vol. (July-September), 1–11. doi: 10.1177/2056305117725223
13. Neuberger, C., C. Nuernbergk (2010). Competition, Complementarity or Integration? The Relationship Between
Professional and Participatory Media. Journalism Practice 4 (3): 319-332. doi:10.1080/17512781003642923
14. Newman, N. (2018). Digital News Project 2018: Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2018.
Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
15. Peer, L., Ksiazek. T. B. (2011). YouTube and the Challenge to Journalism. Journalism Studies 12 (1), 45–63.
doi:10.1080/1461670X.2010.511951
16. Pentzold, C., Bischof, A., & Heise, N. (Eds.). (2018). Praxis Grounded Theory: Theoriegenerierendes empirisches
Forschen in medienbezogenen Lebenswelten. Ein Lehr- und Arbeitsbuch. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
17. Pfetsch, B., Löblich, M., & Eilders, C. (2018). Dissonante Öffentlichkeiten als Perspektive kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Theoriebildung. Publizistik, 63(3), 477–495. doi: 10.1007/s11616-018-0441-1
18. Schweiger, W. (2017). Der (des-)informierte Bürger im Netz: Wie soziale Medien die Meinungsbildung verändern.
Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
19. Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press.
20. Steindl, N., Lauerer, C., & Hanitzsch, T. (2017). Journalismus in Deutschland: Aktuelle Befunde zu Kontinuität
und Wandel im deutschen Journalismus. Publizistik 62 (4), 401–423. doi:10.1007/s11616-017-0378-9
21. van Aelst, P., Strömbäck, J., Aalberg, T., Esser, F., de Vreese, C., Matthes, J., … Stanyer, J. (2017). Political Communication in a High-Choice Media Environment. A Challenge for Democracy? Annals of the International Communication Association, 41(1), 3–27. doi: 10.1080/23808985.2017.1288551
22. Wegener, C. (2019). Politische YouTuber. Gatekeeper oder Meinungsführer. tv diskurs, 23(1), 57–59.

75

Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Intermediaries vs. States or Intermediaries and States
Democracy in the post-intermediation age

Martin Fertmann
Leibniz Institute for Media Research;
Hans-Bredow-Institut
Hamburg, Germanym.fertmann@leibniz-hbi.de

Matthias C. Kettemann
Leibniz Institute for Media Research;
Hans-Bredow-Institut
Hamburg, Germany
m.kettemann@leibniz-hbi.de

KEYWORDS
Intermediaries; States; Human Rights; Democracy; Platform Governance; Social Media Councils

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.19

76

1

INTRODUCTION

Humans are social beings. We experience ourselves through others. A lot of communication has now
moved to online spaces. As the European Court of Human Rights put it in 2015, the internet provides“essential tools for participation in activities and discussions concerning political issues and issues ofgeneral interest” (ECHR 2015). In that sense, it is well accepted that “the internet plays a particularly
important role with respect to the right to freedom of expression” (Committee of Ministers of theCouncil of Europe 2018), and that this role relies on private intermediaries’ digital platforms that notjust regulate access to the online communication space, but constitute – through their rules – large
parts of it (Kettemann/Schulz 2020).
Given the normative frame for online communication is thus to a large extent defined by private
actors, how can states, citizens and users influence the rules which determine the limits of what may
be said online? Do rules formulated exclusively by intermediaries exercising their rights ipso facto
suffer a legitimacy deficit? Can stronger interventions by states into private processes of rulemaking
and -enforcement improve this status quo (Kettemann/Tiedeke 2020), or do they constitute an evenlarger danger (Fertmann/Kettemann 2021)? Is the normative friction between the Old and the “NewGovernors” (Klonick 2017) ever increasing, or rather apt for dissolvement through a stronger mutual
integration of private and public rule-making systems into more symbiotic relationships? If the latteris the case, how could such a re-integration look like?

2

STATES VS. INTERMEDIARIESWhen considering approaches to dissolving the sometimes messy regulatory private-public simultaneity, one may consider full-scale state interventions in order to establish democratically legitimate
and accountable oversight. However, recent examples for the dangers associated with such an approach tell a cautionary tale, even for presumably robust democracies, as such an interventionism isprone to escalate into officeholders attacking intermediaries as proxies for suppressing politicalspeech and public discourses. Repressive regulation, bans of intermediaries’ platforms or even criminal prosecution and imprisonment of employees – or the threat of any of these restrictions – haverecently been used in translucent schemes to make intermediaries’ intervene in favor of those inpower in Belarus (Human Rights Watch 2020), India (Mahapatra/Fertmann/Kettemann 2021), Myanmar (Irving 2019), Nigeria (Nwokoro 2021), Russia (Roache 2021) and in the United States under
the previous administration (Duan/Westling 2020), sometimes in contradiction to the respective
states’ obligations under international human rights law. Therefore incentives for intermediaries’
non-compliance with state requests are needed, if and to the extent which these requests are inconsistent with applicable international law.

3

INTERMEDIARIES VS. STATESThe global conversation around the question who the least-worst actor to control speech on the internet is, states or private platforms, is on the other hand also driven forward by cases in which intermediaries destabilize or even restrict states and public actors through and on their platforms. Intermediaries’ acting against (perceived) harmful communication of government agencies, public officeholders and politicians, such as in the case of the deplatforming of former U.S. president Trump,justifiably also face significant scrutiny for the increase of intermediaries’ discursive power77

associated with them. Next to this specific facet, general concerns relating to confining private powerover individual freedoms and securing the societal prerequisites of social cohesion accentuate theneed for increasing accountability of intermediaries’ governance systems.

4

DEMOCRATIZING INTERMEDIARIES

Against this background, it seems almost unavoidable that institutions for overseeing intermediaries’
governance systems emerge that are constructed from a public/societal as well as a private point ofview: in an environment in which many societies welcome certain measures against content well
below the threshold of illegality, but are weary of the corresponding concentration of power in companies’ and states’ hands, there is not much else to turn to than non-state, non-corporate institutionalarrangements. Such “Social Media Councils” (Article 19 2018; Kaye 2018) may function as a pointof entry for adapted versions of rule of law-principles or even be a starting point for re-importing
democratic values into intermediaries’ private orders. Such models may amount to a democratization
or even socialization of intermediaries.
These institutions can be designed as enablers of political (user, citizen) participation or as expertbased, private reconfigurations of rule of law-principles. They may be implemented through selfregulation (cf. Facebook Oversight Board) or co-regulation (cf. NetzDG-review panels), as part oflarger community moderation systems (Wikipedia Arbitration Committees) or as “soft” advisory institutions (e.g. TikTok regional councils; Twitter Trust and Safety Council) (see Kettemann/Fertmann2021).
This concept is thus far being applied only to improve companies’ governance systems, but it holds
promise also for disincentivizing company compliance with unlawful State requests (Donahoe/Hughes/Kaye 2019, p. 13; Douek 2020; Mahapatra/Fertmann/Kettemann 2021) and could
therefore also dissolve some normative friction in constellations of “States vs. Intermediaries”.
While the existing institutional concepts fall into very different places on the scale between institutional mimicry/whitewahsing and meaningful separation of private power, they all still fall short ofbridging the regulatory public/private disconnect: existing voluntary self-regulation configurations
lack democratic legitimacy and robust enforcement; co-regulatory configurations such as the German
NetzDG’s review panels have trouble interconnecting with the institutional dynamics of companies’
governance systems, thus leaving much of the potential of these institutions unused. A democratic
approach is therefore needed, reimporting democratic legitimacy through co-regulatory platform
councils as “mini-publics” for user participation.

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5

REFERENCES

1.

Article 19 (2018): “Self-regulation and ‘hate speech’ on social media platforms” (2018). https://www.article19.org/resources/self-regulation-hate-speech-social-media-platforms/.

2.

Donahoe, Eileen/Hughes, Thomas/Kaye, David (2019): “Social Media Councils: From Concept to Reality.”
https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/gdpiart_19_smc_conference_report_wip_2019-05-12_final_1.pdf

3.

Duan, Charles/Westling, Jeffrey: Will Trump’s Executive Order Harm Online Speech? It Already Did. Lawfare,June 1 2020, https://www.lawfareblog.com/will-trumps-executive-order-harm-online-speech-it-already-did.

4.

douek, evelyn: The Limits of International Law in Content Moderation (October 12, 2020). UCI Journal of International, Transnational, and Comparative Law, Forthcoming, Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3709566.

5.

European Court of Human Rights, 01.02.2015, Nos 48226/10 and 14027/11, Cengiz and Others vs Turkey, section
49.

6.

Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe (2018): Recommendation CM/ Rec(2018)2 of the Committee of
Ministers to member States on the roles and responsibilities of internet intermediaries, 7 March 2018,https://search.coe.int/cm/Pages/result_details.aspx?ObjectID=0900001680790e14, p. 2.

7.

Irving, Emma (2019): “Suppressing Atrocity Speech on Social Media”, in: AJIL Unbound 113: 256-261,
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-journal-of-interna- tional-law/article/suppressing-atrocityspeech-on-social-media/494334D2936A6A- 6E7C547C70816714D4.

8.

Human Rights Watch (28. August 2020): “Belarus: Internet Disruptions, Online Censorship: Authorities Restrict
Internet Traffic over Continuing Protests”, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/08/28/belarus-internet-disruptionsonline-censorship.

9.

Kaye, David (2018): UN General Assembly: “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of
the right to freedom of opinion and expression”, UN A/HRC/38/35, https://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_e.aspx?si=A/HRC/38/35 , paragraphs 58, 59, 63, 72.

10. Kettemann, Matthias C./Schulz, Wolfgang (2020): Setting Rules for 2.7 Billion. A (First) Look into
Facebook’s Norm-Making System: Results of a Pilot Study (Hamburg: Working Papers of the Hans-Bredow-Institut, Works in Progress # 1, January 2020) (online) (in Review beim Stanford Law and Technology Journal)
11. Kettemann/Tiedeke, Back up: can users sue platforms to reinstate deleted content?, Internet Policy Review 9 (2020)
2 (online)
12. Kettemann, Matthias C. (2020): Menschenrechte und politische Teilhabe im digitalen Zeitalter. Expert opinion
provided in response to a request by the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Assistance of the German
Bundestag (Arbeitspapiere des Hans-Bredow- Instituts, Works in Progress # 2), 17 June 2020, https://leibnizhbi.de/de/publikationen/menschenrechte-und-politische-teilhabe-im-digitalen-zeitalter.
13. Kettemann, Matthias C./Fertmann, Martin (2021): “Platform-Proofing Democracy: Social Media Councils as Tools
to Increase the Public Accountability of Online Platforms”, Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, PotsdamBabelsberg, https://shop.freiheit.org/#!/Publikation/1084.
14. Klonick, Kate (2017): “The New Governors: The People, Rules, and Processes Governing Online Speech” (March
20, 2017). 131 Harv. L. Rev. 1598, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2937985.
15. Mahapatra, Sangeeta/Fertmann, Martin/Kettemann, Matthias C. (2021): Twitter’s Modi Operandi: Lessons from
India on Social Media’s Challenges in Reconci- ling Terms of Service, National Law and Human Rights Law, Verfassungsblog, https:// verfassungsblog.de/twitters-modi-operandi.
16. Nwokoro, Silver (07 June 2021): “SERAP, YRC condemn Twitter ban, urge Commonwealth to sanction Nigeria”;
The Guardian Nigeria, https://guardian.ng/news/serap-yrc-condemn-twitter-ban-urge-commonwealth-to-sanctionnigeria/.
17. Roache, Madeline (01 April 2021): “How Russia Is Stepping Up Its Campaign to Control the Internet”, TIME,
https://time.com/5951834/russia-control-internet/.

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Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Digital Activists
The networking society as a democratic reality

Borucki, Isabelle
Universität Siegen; Universität Duisburg-Essen
Siegen/Duisburg, Germany
isabelle.borucki@uni-due.deZiegler, Stine
Universität Duisburg-Essen
Duisburg, Germany
stine.ziegler@uni-due.de

KEYWORDS
digital activism; political participation; digital divide, participatory divide; Germany

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.20

80

From the very beginning, the spread of the internet brought high hopes for progress in society andpolitics. Low-threshold participation and networking opportunities would allow under-represented
citizens to get involved, optimists argued (Coleman, 2005; van Deth, 2010). However, research so far
showed that the ongoing trend of declining participation (Putnam, 1995), which had been observed
offline, continued online (Vissers & Stolle, 2014), and the forms of interaction and collaboration on
the internet were not able to fulfil optimistic visions. The internet does not gather people to participate
per se. Moreover, anti-democratic developments, such as “dark participation” in social networks,
were becoming more and more apparent (Quandt, 2018; Swart et al., 2018).
On the other hand, recent developments suggest a turning point of political online mobilization.
Movements such as ‘Fridays for Future’ use the internet to grow and, therefore, manage to bringpeople onto the streets, who were previously considered apolitical (Sommer et al., 2019). Right-wingparties such as the German AfD can successfully mobilize non-voters by relying heavily on social
media communication, especially on Facebook (Böhmer & Weissenbach, 2019). Apparently, meansof digital mobilization form a context factor for renewed participation of only specific groups of
citizens – digital activists (Theocharis et al., 2019).
Recently, scholars on digital activism have focused on the concept of digital activism (Joyce, 2010),
the technological environment as a context for digital activism (Kaun & Uldam, 2018) or organizational dynamics around digital activism (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). Others have studied ideologies
of digital activism (Gerbaudo, 2017) or the digital activism divide (Schradie, 2018). Concerning political parties, questions about the changing nature of membership were addressed (Gibson et al.,2017). However, only little is known about the characteristics of digital activists on a micro-level(exception: Schradie, 2018).
With our article, we add insights on digitally active citizens in the case of Germany. We take theinternet and democracy as two interconnected social realities (Floridi, 2015). The democratic society
is digital, so are most of its citizens. As a result, we see a vastly growing number of services offeredby civic tech firms, non-governmental organizations, and governments. Young people, in particular,
are making increasing use of these opportunities, even though, from the perspective of society ingeneral, political participation remains mostly offline (Schaetz et al., 2020). We treat the digital society as a context factor that supports new participatory movements. However, this digitality does notmean a total online democracy.
By finding out more about how politically active citizens get politically involved and how much of
their political actions happen online, the article contributes to the question of why established politicalorganizations are not able to attract supporters online, while some new movements and organizations
do.
Based on the Civic-Voluntarism-Model, we add an exploration of the concerns, motivations and expectations of online political activists (Schlozman et al., 2010). Even though issues of the digital andparticipatory divide are addressed, the focus will be on the motivational dimension of the model. We
aim to shed light on their perception of citizenship in general and of their role in society.
For this purpose, we draw on survey data from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) 2018.
Taking population representative data allow us to better understand the interaction of offline andonline modes of participation and to carve out broad patterns.
81

We aim to describe how digital activists differ from ‘traditional’ activists with reference to the following aspects:

i.
ii.
iii.

their political mindsets, such as political self-efficacy, satisfaction with democracy and trustin political/democratic institutions,
their sets of participation modes (online only/online additionally to offline/partial replacement),
their socioeconomic characteristics.

We apply a broad definition of digital activism. Survey respondents were classified as digital activists
if they reported having participated digitally in at least one way in the past. In contrast, we refer totraditional activists as those who have participated politically but have done so exclusively offline.
Three key findings emerge from our analyses. Firstly, digital activism seems to expand the offline
participation repertoire instead of replacing it. Secondly, personal motivation (in the sense of the
Civic-Voluntarism-Model) appears to be more important than attitudes toward the political system.
And third, the digital activists seem to be profiteers of the digital divide. The results show that online
activism, as assessed here, is very demanding and requires both resources and particular motivation.
However, with reference to the survey data, no statements can be made about the role of internetbased mobilization for participation. Moreover, the operationalization applied does not take into account that online participation is a multidimensional phenomenon (Gibson & Cantijoch, 2013).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Dennis Michels, who was a major contributor to the initial idea of this article.
Furthermore, we would like to thank the participants at the Annual Conference of the DVPW Section
Methods of Political Science (September 2020) for their valuable feedback regarding our first findings.

REFERENCES
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2. Böhmer, A., & Weissenbach, K. (2019). Gekommen, um zu bleiben? Zum Zusammenhang des Institutionalisierungsprozesses der AfD und ihrer Erfolgschancen nach der Bundestagswahl 2017 [Come to stay? On the relationship between the AfD's process of institutionalisation and its chances of success after the 2017 Bundestag elections].
In K.-R. Korte & J. Schoofs (Eds.), Die Bundestagswahl 2017: Analysen der Wahl-, Parteien-, Kommunikationsund Regierungsforschung (pp. 245–265). Springer VS.
3. Coleman, S. (2005). New mediation and direct representation: reconceptualizing representation in the digital age.
New Media & Society, 7(2), 177–198. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444805050745
4. Floridi, L. (Ed.). (2015). The Onlife Manifesto. Springer Open. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04093-6
5. Gerbaudo, P. (2017). From Cyber-Autonomism to Cyber-Populism: An Ideological Analysis of the Evolution of
Digital Activism. TripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable
Information Society, 15(2), 477–489. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v15i2.773
6. Gibson, R., & Cantijoch, M. (2013). Conceptualizing and Measuring Participation in the Age of the Internet: Is
Online Political Engagement Really Different to Offline? The Journal of Politics, 75(3), 701–716.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022381613000431

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7. Gibson, R., Greffet, F., & Cantijoch, M. (2017). Friend or Foe? Digital Technologies and the Changing Nature ofParty Membership. Political Communication, 34(1), 89–111. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2016.1221011
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10. Putnam, R. D. (1995). Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Journal of Democracy, 6(1), 65–78.
https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.1995.0002
11. Quandt, T. (2018). Dark Participation. Media and Communication, 6(4), 36–48.
https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v6i4.1519
12. Schaetz, N., Leißner, L., Porten-Cheé, P., Emmer, M., & Strippel, C. (2020). Politische Partizipation in Deutschland 2019. (Weizenbaum Report, 1) [Political Participation in Germany 2019]. Berlin. Weizenbaum Institute for the
Networked Society - The German Internet Institute. https://doi.org/10.34669/WI.WR/1
13. Schlozman, K. L., Verba, S., & Brady, H. E. (2010). Weapon of the Strong? Participatory Inequality and the Internet. Perspectives on Politics, 8(2), 487–509. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592710001210
14. Schradie, J. (2018). The Digital Activism Gap: How Class and Costs Shape Online Collective Action. Social Problems, 65(1), 51–74. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spx042
15. Sommer, M., Rucht, D., Haunss, S., & Zajak, S. (2019). Fridays for Future. Profil, Entstehung und Perspektiven derProtestbewegung in Deutschland [Fridays for Future. The profile, origins and perspectives of the protest movementin Germany]. Ipb Working Paper Series(2).
16. Swart, J., Peters, C., & Broersma, M. (2018). Shedding light on the dark social: The connective role of news andjournalism in social media communities. New Media & Society, 20(11), 4329–4345.
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17. Theocharis, Y., Moor, J., & Deth, J. W. (2019). Digitally Networked Participation and Lifestyle Politics as New
Modes of Political Participation. Policy & Internet, 28(2), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.231
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19. Vissers, S., & Stolle, D. (2014). The Internet and new modes of political participation: online versus offline participation. Information, Communication & Society, 17(8), 937–955. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2013.867356

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Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres“Can we please stop yelling at each other justbecause it’s the Internet?”
Comparing incivility perceptions of community managers, users, and activists in online comment sections

Bormann, Marike
Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf, Germany
marike.bormann@hhu.de

Heinbach, DominiqueHeinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf, Germany
dominique.heinbach@hhu.deZiegele, Marc
Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf, Germany
marc.ziegele@hhu.de

KEYWORDS
Incivility; norm violations; online discussion; focus groups

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.21

84

1

INTRODUCTION

The roles of journalists and recipients have changed, especially since the emergence of social networking sites (SNS). The publication of content on SNS and the supervision of the subsequent online
discussions have become an integral part of everyday editorial work, and the new journalistic role ofcommunity mangers has emerged. Online discussions offer promising benefits as they promote deliberation between users and foster participatory journalism (Quandt, 2018; Ruiz et al., 2011). However, there are major concerns about the low quality of these discussions and an increase of uncivil
behavior such as insults, vulgarity, discriminatory language and lies (e.g., Coe, Kenski & Rains, 2014;
Diakopoulos & Naamann, 2011). Consequently, community managers, single users and different activist groups have started to engage in comment sections and counter behavior they perceive as uncivil, sanction users and improve the discussion atmosphere (e.g., Friess, Ziegele & Heinbach, 2020;
Kalch & Naab, 2017; Ziegele et al., 2018).
However, the scientific debate over what exactly constitutes incivility is still ongoing: While scholars
agree that incivility is a violation of norms, they disagree which norms constitute incivility (e.g.,
Muddiman, 2017; Stryker, Conway & Silver, 2016). Recent research further suggests that incivility
is highly subjective and lies in the eye of the beholder (e.g., Herbst, 2010; Kenski, Coe, & Rains,2017). Such considerations imply a perceptual construct of incivility. Approaching such a constructrequires asking the actors involved in online discussions about what they perceive as uncivil. However, only few studies have addressed incivility perceptions of different online actors, namely community managers, users and activists. Studies in this field typically focused on one type of incivility(Chen et al., 2018), or on one group of actors such as activists (Ziegele et al., 2019). Moreover, mostof the studies defined a priori types of incivility (e.g., Kenski, Coe, & Rains, 2017; Muddiman, 2017)
rather than exploratively inquiring what the participants perceive as uncivil. Therefore, we brought
together community managers, users, and activists to address the following research question:
What do different actors of public online discussions perceive as uncivil and where do they agree anddiffer in their perceptions of incivility?

2

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

In recent years, incivility in public online discussions has increasingly gained scholarly attention.
However, definitions and operationalizations of incivility vary widely: While scholars largely agree
that incivility is a violation of norms, they disagree regarding which norms constitute incivility. The
majority of studies conceptualized incivility either as a violation of politeness norms (e.g., Chen &Lu, 2017; Mutz, 2007), deliberative respect norms (e.g., Anderson et al., 2014; Coe et al., 2014), or
democratic norms (e.g., Papacharissi, 2004). Additionally, recent studies have approached incivility
as a violation of multiple norms and empirical findings suggest that incivility is highly subjectively
shaped (e.g., Muddiman, 2017; Stryker et al., 2016). We follow these extended approaches and conceptualize incivility as a perceptual construct that includes violations of multiple norms. More specifically, we build on a new approach of Bormann and colleagues (under review) who developed an
integrative framework that incorporates previous incivility concepts. They suggest a multidimensional concept consisting of five injunctive communication norms that participants of online discussions can disapprove of violating. The information norm is about the substance (i.e., quality, quantity,
relevance) of the information provided in a discussion. The modality norm refers to the formal aspect85

of communication and asks participants to communicate clearly. The process norm refers to the reciprocity of contributions. The relation norm asks participants to be respectful and polite with eachother. Finally, the political context norm refers to liberal democratic norms. According to the authors,violations of one or several of these five norms potentially constitute incivility.

3

METHODTo answer the research question, we employed a qualitative semi-structured focus group methodology and composed five heterogeneous focus groups with representatives of the three types of actors:(1) Community managers of public, private, regional, and national news media, including broadcasting and print, (2) ordinary users, and (3) members of the largest German activist groups #Iamhere
and No Hate Speech Movement. The sample comprised a total of 25 participants. The focus groups
were conducted face-to-face in November 2019 in five different German cities. Two researchers moderated the focus groups and the approximate duration was two hours. The interview guide included
open questions and stimuli on perceptions and evaluations of norm violations in public online discussions. The focus groups were audio-recorded, transcribed and analyzed with a thematic qualitative
content analysis (Kuckartz, 2014).

4

RESULTSIn general, all actors perceived a lack of empathy and humanity in public online discussions andexpressed concerns about this development. They reported various violations of all five communication norms, and there appears to be a large common ground which communication acts are perceived
and condemned as uncivil: All three types of actors most frequently mentioned violations of the political context norm, followed by violations of the relation norm, the information norm, and the process norm. Overall, violations of the modality norm are mentioned less often. Nevertheless, violationsof all five norms are more or less perceived as uncivil. In terms of severity, differences between thenorms can be identified: Violations of the context and relation norm tend to be perceived as more
severe than other norm violations.
Violations of the political context norm that were frequently reported and perceived as uncivil were
hate speech, incitement and discrimination of marginalized groups, attacks against individual andcollective liberty rights, and attacks against democratic and constitutional principles. Perceived violations of the relation norm were, among others, insults, swearing, vulgarity, threats, and slurs. Uncivil violations of the information norm were, for example, spreading dis- and misinformation suchas lies or conspiracy theories, as well as referring to unreliable sources and dubious or unsubstantiatedclaims. In addition, users reported specific violations of the information norm caused by community
managers: A lack of transparency regarding sanctions, and the deletion of comments containing media-related criticism, which the users perceived as censorship and deception. Regarding the process
norm, the most frequently reported violations were topic deviation and ignorance of other participants’ contributions. Violations of the modality norm were reported less often and some of them were
contentious between different actors, for example, sarcasm or ambiguous communication. Whereassome participants perceived irony and sarcasm as uncivil, others found ironic and sarcastic commentsin public online discussions to be entertaining.
The results and its implications will be discussed in more detail in the presentation.

86

5

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by the Digital Society research program funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia.

6

REFERENCES

1.

Quandt, T. (2018). Dark Participation. Media and Communication, 6(4), 36-48.
http://dx.doi.org/10.17645/mac.v6i4.1519

2.

Ruiz, C., Domingo, D., Micó, J. L., Díaz-Noci, J., Meso, C., & Masip, P. (2011). Public Sphere 2.0? The Democratic Qualities of Citizen Debates in Online Newspapers. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 16, 463–487.

3.

Coe, K., Kenski, K. y Rains, S. A. (2014). Online and uncivil? Patterns and determinants of incivility in newspaper
website comments. Journal of Communication, 64(4), 658–679. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12104

4.

Diakopoulos, N., & Naamann, M. (2011). Towards quality discourse in online news comments. In P. J. Hinds, J. C.
Tang, J. Wang, J. E. Bardram, & N. Ducheneaut (Eds.), Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer
supported cooperative work (pp. 133–142). New York: ACM Press.

5.

Friess, D., Ziegele, M., & Heinbach, D. (2020). Collective Civic Moderation for Deliberation? Exploring the Links
between Citizens’ Organized Engagement in Comment Sections and the Deliberative Quality of Online Discussions. Political Communication, 1–23.

6.

Kalch, A., & Naab, T. K. (2017). Replying, disliking, flagging: How users engage with uncivil and impolite comments on news sites. Studies in Communication and Media, 6(4), 395–419. https://doi.org/10.5771/2192-40072017-4-395

7.

Ziegele, M., Jost, P., Bormann, M., & Heinbach, D. (2018). Journalistic counter-voices in comment sections: Patterns, determinants, and potential consequences of interactive moderation of uncivil user comments. Studies in
Communication and Media, 7(4), 525–554. https://doi.org/10.5771/2192-4007-2018-4-525

8.

Muddiman, A. (2017). Personal and public levels of political incivility. International Journal of Communication,
11, 3182-3202.

9.

Stryker, R., Conway, B. A., & Danielson, J. T. (2016). What is political incivility? Communication Monographs,
83(4), 535-556. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2016.1201207

10. Herbst, S. (2010). Rude democracy: Civility and incivility in American politics. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press.
11. Kenski, K., Coe, K. & Rains, S. A. (2017). Perceptions of uncivil discourse online: An examination of types andpredictors. Communication Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650217699933
12. Chen, G. M., Pain, P., Chen, V. Y., Mekelburg, M., Springer, N., & Troger, F. (2018). ‘You really have to have athick skin’: A cross-cultural perspective on how online harassment influences female journalists. Journalism, 21(7),877–895. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884918768500
13. Ziegele, M., Naab, T. K., & Jost, P. (2019). Lonely together? Identifying the determinants of collective corrective
action against uncivil comments. New Media & Society. Advance online publication. doi:org/10.1177/1461444819870130
14. Chen, G. M., & Lu, S. (2017). Online political discourse: Exploring differences in effects of civil and uncivil disagreement in news website comments. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 61(1), 108–125.
https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2016.1273922
15. Mutz, D. C. (2007). Effects of “In-your-face” television discourse on perceptions of a legitimate opposition. American Political Science Review, 101, 621–635. https://doi.org/10.1017/S000305540707044X
16. Anderson, A. A., Brossard, D., Scheufele, D. A., Xenos, M. A., & Ladwig, P. (2014). The "nasty effect:" Online
incivility and risk perceptions of emerging technologies. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3),373–387. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12009
17. Papacharissi, Z. (2004). Democracy online: civility, politeness, and the democratic potential of online political discussion groups. NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY, 6(2), 259–283. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444804041444

8718. Bormann, M., Tranow, U., Vowe, G., & Ziegele, M. (under review). Incivility as a Violation of Communication
Norms - A Typology Based on Normative Expectations toward Political Communication.
19. Kuckartz, U. (2014). Qualitative text analysis: A guide to methods, practice and using. London: Sage.

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Proceedings of the Weizenbaum Conference 2021

Democracy in Flux
Order, Dynamics and Voices in Digital Public Spheres

Digital Public Activism and the
Redefinition of CitizenshipThe movement against the citizenship (amendment) act of India

Mahapatra, Sangeeta
German Institute for Global and Area Studies
Hamburg, Germany
Sangeeta.Mahapatra@giga-hamburg.de

Garimella, Kiran
MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Cambridge MA, USAgarimell@mit.edu

KEYWORDS
Digital publics; digital activism; citizenship; social movements; India

DOI: 10.34669/wi.cp/3.23

89

Social media, as a site of direct political communication and participation, allows for the study ofcitizenship-in-action. In this article, we explore the normative construction of citizenship by the citizens themselves. This relates to identity, values, and civic actions of citizenship (Coleman and Blumler, 2009), that is, its substantive rather than procedural aspects. Taken as a claims-making process(Tilly and Tarrow, 2006), citizenship can reflect solidarity, as well as competing loyalties in a diverse
democracy (Gopal, 2013). How does this happen in the digital space, that is just as diverse when it
comes to its avenues, affordances, and audiences? We take the case of India, the world’s largest digitalising democracy, to study this.
On 11 December 2019, India passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), which, for the firsttime, made religion a part of citizenship to the detriment of the country’s largest religious minority,
the Muslims. This undermined the principle of secularism guaranteed by the Indian Constitution. This
sparked off student-led protests, which under a month, grew into a country-wide movement comprising women, professionals, farmers, marginalised castes, and LGBTQ communities, all of whom, despite their differences, positioned themselves as protectors of a liberal republic against an illiberalstate. At the same time, another group of citizens started protesting against the protesters. They projected themselves as defenders of the state, speaking on its behalf. This makes both a top-down studyof citizenship as given by the state and a bottom-up study of citizenship gained through struggle against the state (Blaug, 2002; Gopal, 2013) limited. We take a different approach— a more horizontal study of citizenship as constructed through cooperation and contestation between citizens.
This builds on the idea of ‘actualising citizenship’, where loose personal networks share informationand organise civic action using social technologies (Bennett, 2008).
We use a constructivist approach to examine our research questions, which focus on the three core
aspects of citizenship as articulated by the protesters (anti-CAA) and the state defenders (pro-CAA):(a) How did anti- and pro-CAA define themselves and others as citizens? (b) What values did antiand pro-CAA ascribe to citizenship when it came to themselves and others? (c) What constituted the
civic actions of anti- and pro-CAA? Instead of the state, citizens defined the attributes of ‘good’ and‘bad’ citizenship. Social media activity, in this case, is taken to reflect ground reality.
Taking conversations as content, we examine texts, images, and videos from Twitter, Instagram,
YouTube, and WhatsApp from 11 December 2019 to 31 January 2020, the peak period of the protest.
As Indians account for the largest number of social media accounts per person in the world (11.5
accounts/person: Dean 2021), a dataset from multiple platforms provides a rounded view of citizenship claims made by a more representative sample of citizens. We collected data by using the official
API for each of the platform taking the hashtags #CAA, #CAB (Citizenship Amendment Bill),#CAA-NRC-NPR (National Register of Citizens and National Population Register that were associated with CAA), #NRC, #indiaagainstCAA, and #isupportcaa. We collected 500 random but purposive posts each from Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, which had more than 100 retweets and comments, indicating engagement. These posts were manually checked for being organic and not belonging to a political influencer so that they could be taken as an approximation for the voice of the personon the street. For WhatsApp, we joined public groups that discuss politics in India. We filtered datafrom 1000 such groups to code messages containing the keywords #CAA, #NRC, and #CAB. The
posts of all four platforms were hand-coded for key words and qualitatively studied for themes associated with the three research questions.

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Instagram was the most personalised and expressive platform while Twitter showed more citizens
posting content of political influencers. However, the normative, descriptive, and performative attributes of citizenship were the same across platforms. In terms of identity, anti-CAA identified citizens
as ‘defenders of the constitution’ (more than 96 per cent) while describing pro-CAA as ‘anti-constitution’ (more 94.8 per cent). The pro-CAA identified citizens as ‘national’ (more than 87 per cent)and anti-CAA as ‘anti-national’ (more than 71 per cent). In terms of values, ‘right to dissent/peacefulprotest’ was the predominant self-ascribing citizenship value of anti-CAA (more than 75 per cent)while pro-CAA were described as ‘supporting police brutality’. The pro-CAA’s self-ascribing value
was being ‘responsible citizens’ (more than 73 per cent), while describing anti-CAA as ‘law breakers/
instigating violence’ (more than 75 per cent). In terms of civic action, opinion mobilisation, information sharing, and call-to-action formed the bulk of anti-CAA (more than 68 to 94 per cent acrossplatforms) and pro-CAA (59 to 92 per cent across platforms). About 76 per cent of WhatsApp posts
were misinformation and hate speech against the anti-CAA. The anti-CAA used more images, videos,songs, memes, posters, and poems, asserting their legitimacy by reclaiming the Constitution and national flags and symbols. The pro-CAA used mostly videos, images, and accusatory content. The bulkof the most engaged content was that of the anti-CAA across platforms. In this contest, they gained
definitional dominance. The digital space aided their construction of citizenship of inclusion, bringing
them closer to what the Indian Political Scientist Kalpana Kannabiran (2021) has called ‘constitutionas-commons’— a collective crafting of the jurisprudence of citizenship through civic engagement.
This represents transformative jurisprudence where people arrogate to themselves the power andagency to deem themselves as citizens, determining its attendant values, rights, and responsibilities
through collective deliberation. Citizenship as defined by the secondary attribute of nationalism isrejected as extreme statism, which is unjust and exclusionary.

REFERENCES
1.

Coleman, S. and Blumler, J.G. (2009). The Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Theory, Practice and Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2.

Tilly, C. and Tarrow, S. (2006). Contentious Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

3.

Gopal, N.J. (2013). Citizenship and Its Discontents. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

4.

Blaug, R. (2002). Engineering democracy. Political Studies, 50 (1), 102-116.

5.

Bennett, W.L. (2008). Changing Citizenship in the Digital Age. In W.L. Bennett (Ed.), Civic Life Online. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1-24.

6.

Dean, B. (2021). Social Network Usage and Growth Statistics: How Many People Use Social Media in 2021.
https://backlinko.com/social-media-users (Retrieved: 26 April 2021).

7.

Kannabiran, K. (2021). Constitution-As-Commons: Notes on Decolonizing Citizenship in India. South Atlantic
Quarterly, 120 (1), 232-241.

91