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How the Far-Right Polarises Twitter: ‘Hashjacking’ as a Disinformation Strategy in Times of COVID-19

  • 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.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Part of a Book
Language:English
Author(s):Philipp DariusORCiD, Fabian Stephany
Parent Title (English):Complex Networks & Their Applications X. COMPLEX NETWORKS 2021. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 1016
Publisher:Springer
Place of Publisher:Cham
Publication year:2022
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
First Page:100
Last Page:111
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93413-2_9
ISBN:978-3-030-93413-2
ISBN:978-3-030-93412-5
Release Date:2022/01/11
Tag:COVID-19 Hashtags Networks Political communication strategies #CoronaVirusDE #FlattenTheCurve
Conference title:International Conference on Complex Networks and Their Applications
Conference place:Madrid, Spain
Conference date:30.11.2021 - 2.12.2021
Hertie School Research:Publications PhD Researchers
Centre for Digital Governance
Licence of document (German):Metadaten / metadata
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