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Are social media platforms accelerators of democratic fragmentation? An inquiry into the relationship of democratic fragmentation and social media platforms in three political arenas: political campaigns, protest movements and democratic institutions

  • Whilst social media platforms provide global communication environments, these platforms are not primarily designed for political debates. This may have adverse effects on democracy and contribute to democratic fragmentation. This dissertation project investigates the role of social media platforms as potential accelerators of fragmentation in established democracies. The overarching question of this dissertation explores to what extent social media platforms may contribute to fragmentation that may result in the erosion of democracy. This dissertation comprises three articles focusing on three political arenas 1) political campaigns, 2) protest movements, and 3) democratic institutions. The first paper investigates the polarisation of online political behaviour on Twitter in democratic election campaigns. The analysis is based on Twitter data of German political parties and election hashtags during the final week of the 2017 and 2021 German Federal elections. The study’s findings suggest that the far-right party AfD seeks to polarise online discourse as a strategy and that far-right online partisans may influence the public reception of politicians and established parties. The second paper examines the formation of protest movements on Twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom. The study monitors two established conspiracy narratives and their communities on Twitter, the anti-vaccination and anti-5G communities, before and during the first UK lockdown. The study finds that, despite content moderation efforts by Twitter, conspiracy groups were able to proliferate their messages and influence broader public discourses on Twitter, such as #Lockdown in the United Kingdom. The findings underline social platforms' potential for protest formation that can result in disinformed social movements. The third paper inspects social platform companies’ mimicking of democratic institutions like Meta’s oversight board for content decisions that may erode existing democratic institutions. The study traces the emergence of the supreme court metaphor for Meta’s oversight board and its use in the US News discourse. The findings emphasise how private organisations and the use of constitutional metaphors can erode the legitimacy of supreme courts and other democratic institutions. The dissertation’s findings imply that social media platforms, besides their democratically desirable function for democratic participation and deliberative potentials, contribute to democratic fragmentation in the inspected arenas of political campaigns, disinformed protest movements and democratic institutions. Thus, extended research data access is key to better understanding the social implications of social media platforms and finding adequate regulations of recommender systems, content moderation, and advertisement-based business models.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language:English
Author(s):Philipp DariusORCiD
Advisor:Andrea Römmele, Rachel Gibson, Ulrike Klinger
Hertie Collections (Serial Number):Dissertations submitted to the Hertie School (06/2023)
Publication year:2023
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
Granting Institution:Hertie School
Thesis date:2023/07/27
Number pages:136
DOI:https://doi.org/10.48462/opus4-5055
Release Date:2023/08/14
Notes:
Parts of the dissertation have been published:

Chapter 3: Darius P (2022) “Who Polarizes Twitter? Ideological Polarisation, Partisan Groups and Strategic Networked Campaigning on Twitter during the 2017 and 2021 German Federal Elections ‘Bundestagswahlen.’” Social Network Analysis and Mining 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-022-00958-w.
The version of record of this article, first published in Social Network Analysis and Mining, is available online at the Publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-022-00958-w

Chapter 4: Darius P, Urquhart M (2021) “Disinformed Social Movements: A Large-Scale Mapping of Conspiracy Narratives as Online Harms during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Online Social Networks and Media 26: 100174. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.osnem.2021.100174
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Chapter 5: Cowls J, Darius P, Santistevan D, Schramm M (2022) “Constitutional Metaphors: Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’ and the Legitimation of Platform Governance.” New Media & Society, April 5, 2022, 14614448221085560. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221085559
Notes:
Shelf mark: 2023D006 + 2023D006+1
Hertie School Research:Publications PhD Researchers
Centre for Digital Governance
Licence of document (German):Creative Commons - CC BY-NC - Namensnennung - Nicht kommerziell 4.0 International
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