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

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Complex Networks & Their Applications X (COMPLEX NETWORKS 2021)

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Abstract

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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Correspondence to Fabian Stephany .

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7 Appendix

7 Appendix

Fig. 4.
figure 4

The retweet network of #AfD from May 2020 shows a clear bimodal clustering of accounts. Accounts in the left (red) cluster are assigned as AfD partisans. The party’s official account (@AfD), the AfD parliamentary account (@AfDimBundestag), and the account of the parliamentary leader (@Alice_Weidel) are highlighted in yellow.

Table 1. For thirty randomly selected retweets cluster assignment and content sentiment towards AfD are compared. A pearson correlation coefficient of 0.92 indicates that cluster assignment and content’s sentiment are well aligned.

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Darius, P., Stephany, F. (2022). How the Far-Right Polarises Twitter: ‘Hashjacking’ as a Disinformation Strategy in Times of COVID-19. In: Benito, R.M., Cherifi, C., Cherifi, H., Moro, E., Rocha, L.M., Sales-Pardo, M. (eds) Complex Networks & Their Applications X. COMPLEX NETWORKS 2021. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 1073. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93413-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93413-2_9

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