TY - CHAP A1 - Darius, Philipp A1 - Stephany, Fabian T1 - How the Far-Right Polarises Twitter: ‘Hashjacking’ as a Disinformation Strategy in Times of COVID-19 T2 - Complex Networks & Their Applications X. COMPLEX NETWORKS 2021. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 1016 N2 - Twitter influences political debates. Phenomena like fake news and hate speech show that political discourses on social platforms can become strongly polarised by algorithmic enforcement of selective perception. Some political actors actively employ strategies to facilitate polarisation on Twitter, as past contributions show, via strategies of ‘hashjacking’(The use of someone else’s hashtag in order to promote one’s own social media agenda.). For the example of COVID-19 related hashtags and their retweet networks, we examine the case of partisan accounts of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and their potential use of ‘hashjacking’ in May 2020. Our findings indicate that polarisation of political party hashtags has not changed significantly in the last two years. We see that right-wing partisans are actively and effectively polarising the discourse by ‘hashjacking’ COVID-19 related hashtags, like #CoronaVirusDE or #FlattenTheCurve. This polarisation strategy is dominated by the activity of a limited set of heavy users. The results underline the necessity to understand the dynamics of discourse polarisation, as an active political communication strategy of the far-right, by only a handful of very active accounts. KW - COVID-19 Hashtags Networks Political communication strategies #CoronaVirusDE #FlattenTheCurve Y1 - 2022 SN - 978-3-030-93413-2 SN - 978-3-030-93412-5 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93413-2_9 SP - 100 EP - 111 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Darius, Philipp A1 - Stephany, Fabian ED - Weber (et al.), Ingmar T1 - “Hashjacking” the Debate: Polarisation Strategies of Germany’s Political Far-Right on Twitter T2 - Social Informatics. SocInfo 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11864 N2 - Twitter is a digital forum for political discourse. The emergence of phenomena like fake news and hate speech has shown that political discourse on micro-blogging can become strongly polarised by algorithmic enforcement of selective perception. Recent findings suggest that some political actors might employ strategies to actively facilitate polarisation on Twitter. With a network approach, we examine the case of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and their potential use of a “hashjacking” strategy (The use of someone else’s hashtag in order to promote one’s own social media agenda.). Our findings suggest that right-wing politicians (and their supporters/retweeters) actively and effectively polarise the discourse not just by using their own party hashtags, but also by “hashjacking” the political party hashtags of other established parties. The results underline the necessity to understand the success of right-wing parties, online and in elections, not entirely as a result of external effects (e.g. migration), but as a direct consequence of their digital political communication strategy. KW - Hashtags KW - Networks KW - Political communication strategies Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34971-4_21 SN - 978-3-030-34971-4 VL - 11846 SP - 298 EP - 308 PB - Springer CY - Cham ER -