*34C3 preroll music*
Herald: The next speaker is born and
raised in Germany. He lives and works as a PhD student in Canada as a member of a
research group on extremist politics in democratic systems and he'll give us an
insight into the public discourse in Germany focused on the so called
"Alternative für Deutschland". Please welcome Alexander Beyer.
*applause*
Beyer: Thank you very much. Thank you people, for showing up in the Saal Borg,
thank you, the internet, for watching, a very big thank you for the organizers, for
giving me the opportunity to, to give this little talk. Yeah, my name is Alexander
Beyer and everywhere I went this winter, I didn't have to wear a winter jacket
because the temperatures were very mild and I will tell you in a minute why that
matters. As I already said, I'm a member of a
research group in Vancouver, where we look at what happens, how extremist parties and
politics fare in democratic systems and we decided to focus this research project
on the fascinating - for researchers fascinating - case of Germany and asking
the questions, if we can point fingers and is it a viable, a valid
judgment to say, the media, the media is to blame for the rise of the AfD?
For anyone who, who decided at the end of 2017 that they would spend most of 2016 in
hibernation - which seemed like a pretty good idea at the time - I will give a
quick rundown what happened: So, we had election in September and the domino
piece that was Germany fell. Domino piece in a sense, that all around in Europe far-
right parties had considerable success in the past, in the recent past, and Germany
was the sort of last stalwart in Central Europe, where a far-right party did
not get at the government, this happened in September and it did not only
get into government, er, into Parliament, it also, the way that it looks like now, it
might become the official leader of the opposition.
So, when these results came in, pundits were really, really quick to call the
shots. The, the dominating sentiment was, that it
was the media's fault: They took the positions of the AfD and gave
disproportionate amounts of coverage to this far-right extremist party. And this
sentiment had a lot of truthiness to it. So, it had a lot of: "Yeah, sure, I can see
why", right, everyone that opened his newspaper or opened a news website,
stories about the AfD seemed, or about anything.. about something that's related
to the AfD, seemed to dominate coverage. This went along with a little bit of a
felt truth, a truth that was perceived by people, about how the campaigning season
was a lot of season and not a lot of campaigning, despite Martin Schultz's best
efforts. A whole lot of sunshine, but not a lot of
conflict and this was something that then was perceived to be very, uh, well, I don't
want to say very skillfully, but somehow filled by the AfD and and the topics that
are of concern to this party. So what are we doing today here? First
off, I'm a political scientist by trade and political scientists like theory. I
know that this is an event, where [I] figure you might not at the forefront of
everyone's minds, but it is for me, because talking and arguing to political
scientists about theory is kind of like mud-wrestling with a pig: you do that for
two or three hours and then you realize, oh, this pig actually enjoys this. So I'll
be sort of, I have one slide on what we, what previous theories would suggest
has, have happened and how it could have happened and then I'll show you what kind
of data we have collected, to systematically answer this question and
talk about public discourse in Germany and then to the meat and potatoes of the talk,
about how the campaign unfolded in the media and I will than, to end I will show
some more data, that is a bit different, that paints a picture on why this election
was a special election and why it was sort of a perfect storm of an election for a
far-right party and why this actually makes us claim that the media could be
said to have behaved pretty reasonable. As a little teaser.
OK. Theory. One slide. Two possible mechanisms of media effects. There's this
normative, very endearing and wonderful idea, that if you read something, that
someone carefully crafts and he or she constructs an argument, that is well
written, well made, you read this, you take it in, you're persuaded by that,
regardless of what this argument is. 60 years of media research suggests, that this
doesn't happen. Pre-existing opinions are extremely
difficult to change in each and every single one of us, even though we're likely
to admit that "No, no sure, I'm a rational thinker, I take standpoints if they're
convincing to me and I internalize them.", but it's not how this works.
The second possible effect, and the one that will be of of concern to us today at
the core of the presentation, is something that's called Priming. So, the media can't
tell people what to think, it can't persuade people independently of the
previous opinions that people have, but it's really, really successful in telling
people, what to think about. It's super good, the media is super good, reading
something is very effective in bringing something to the front of your mind.
And here I.. here I can tell you, why I told you about my my choice of attire in
winter. A vast majority of you probably thought when I said this "'Oh, I didn't
have to wear a winter jacket', wow, what's.. who is this guy?" But maybe a few of you
thought "Yeah, sure it was pretty mild, that's climate change."
So, without naming the issue, I.. there's a chance, that I primed a few of
you, to consider climate change and pull that in your frontal lobe, at the front of
your mind. This is, this is important, this is a.. the
central thing, that we have to consider if we ask, if the media wrote up a party like
the AfD. Also important to consider here is, that
priming is easier - or there's an indirect effect of priming as well - where a topic
that is owned by a specific party, that's the thing that then favors the party
subsequently. So, if the media writes a lot about
refugees, a xenophobic far-right party, that has this problem of refugees at the
core of their agenda, will reap in benefits in our minds, in that it's agenda will be,
will fall on fertile ground. So far the theory, that's all. So, what did
we do based on this theory? We collected data, lots of data, we have.. we understand this
data.. we understand this text, that we collected to be data and we use natural
language processing to analyze that. Natural Language Processing basically
means, that we're giving language to a computer that wasn't written specifically
to be understood by a computer and try to extract meaningful analysis based on what
the computer is doing with this. So, we used some sifting methods to
collect about 8.500 articles from four central German news websites: Focus, Bild,
Welt and Spiegel. And we have.. that results in a unique data set, that, to our
knowledge, no one else has. If so, please reach out to us.
And this was so unique, that it deserves at least six fire emojis. It was also pretty
exciting because, that was pretty cheap. We were two people that were mainly concerned
with collecting this data and I don't want to, I don't want to calculate my hourly
wage, but it was almost done with no financial expense. And this is cool,
because we're social scientists, we're faced with this problem, with this very
interesting case of Germany sort of falling in line, very delayed, with lots of
other countries around it - in terms of the far-right party getting their seats in
Parliament and we can use methods that are available to us, if we're sort of like
sitting down and reading our stack overflow and sort of teaching those
methods to us, to systematically try to answer this question.
Let's dive right in. The share of party mentions in online news. So, what we did
for each day, we calculated what the total number of mentioned political actors is.
We did that based on word lists, that we carefully crafted, that included candidate's
names and party abbreviations and party names and things like "Kanzlerin" and
"Kanzlerkandiat" for the CDU/CSU and the SPD respectively and we let that thing rip
through our little rscript that we have. So, the average of mentions of each party
over the course of the campaign looks something like this: Between July 1st and
September 24th - that's the time frame that we concentrated on - we see a clear
incumbency bonus, the "Kanzlerbonus" the "Kanzlerinbonus" for the CDU/CSU, social
democrats high twenties, and the AfD at 10.7 %. Here we might say at smaller
parties.. a little note to the green and the left, so with this dictionary method is
kind of tricky, because we can't say: "Oh yeah, well we just gonna count every occurrence
of Grüne and Linke" for the Green Party and the Left Party, because then we get stuff
like 'the green banana' and 'the left hand' that is counted for them. So that's why
here we're only using candidates' names. That's why they probably.. they sort of
underperform. But for our purpose of talking about why the AFD got favored by
the media, we're sort of letting that drop under the table. So, the story here is
over the course of the campaign, 10.7 % of mentions were happening that mentioned the
AFD, basically. Case closed. Right, AFD got 12.7 % in the election. That doesn't really
sound like it was favored by the media. And a few of you might know this analysis
from a blog post, that me and Constanze Kurz wrote for Netzpolitik, sort of like 45
seconds after the election, when we worked on truncated data. And we also focused on
print media and this is sort of what this graph looked like, that we based our
conclusion on. AFD didn't really get any disproportionate amount of coverage. It
actually is in the.. in the last week of the campaign.. last weeks of the campaign
actually is outperformed by the FDP. Science is the current state of airing, or
the.. so, now that we have better data in terms of online news data this whole story
looks a bit different. If we take the average over the whole course of the
campaign and actually have it shown to us.. Stay by the day - This is what I want
to focus on now. So just looking at the sort of tail end of
this all the way to the right, when we get close to the election date, the order of
this is surprisingly close to the actual election results. The parties actually do
get in the order, that they came out of the election. But we do see a little curve
that gets closer to a curve that should be bigger. And this is where the.. well, I
don't want to say magic, but this is where the interesting stuff lies. So let's
look at the curves one after the other. The CDU/CSU, as you would expect, as the
incumbent anything that is remotely political in domestic and international
politics, will score mentions for the Chancellor and the CDU/CSU. That's why
this curve is considerably higher than the others, but we do see a downward tendency
the closer we get to the campaign, when campaign coverage shifted from the
incumbent to the competitors. Especially the underdog competitors. Which is kind..
that's a bad transfer to the SPD now, but if we look at the curve of the
Social Democratic Party, there's a slight bump around August and Martin Schulz
really tried to drive home this issue of justice as the central campaign promise
and there's another little slight humper on September 1st, begin of
September, when the televised debate happened, but the overall trend is pretty
linear, doesn't seem to be, if we would just smooth this plot out to be a straight
line, it probably would be pretty much horizontal. Not so for the AFD. So
remember, over the course of the campaign they got 10.7 % on average of mentions
*drinks from his bottle* And that's true. If we calculate an
average of that, of course, this looks like it scores considerably lower than the two
major parties. But something happens in late August and all of a sudden this party
gets actually close to the Social Democrats. It like.. starting in late
August, the tendency becomes one, that is pretty considerably upwards. And if we
take the average of only the two last weeks before the election, we get to a
number of 19.6 of all mentions are talking about the AFD there. Which is something, if
you think about the mechanisms of priming, those are short term effects. We're
looking for things that happen over a short term or have an effect in a pretty
short term. So this is something that is extremely important. At the beginning of
this time frame, where the plot becomes something that has a trend that shows
upwards, around, like, August 28th - where that first little mountain.. first little
summit occurs - two things happened: one, a refugee boat capsized in the
Mediterranean. An event that we've sadly and.. have to see terrifyingly often and
one of the people died. And the second thing that happened was, that Alexander
Gauland in an interview claimed, that a German politician should be dumped in
Anatolia. And it's interesting, if you talk about.. if you extract the topics, that
are covered in relation to the AFD before and after this moment.
Before this August 28th, it's a lot about Alice Weidel writing emails where it turns
out, she's not the public persona that she claims she is and it's a lot about
internal rifts of this far-right party. The internal tensions between the super
far right wing and the far right or right wing-wing and afterwards, there's a
surprising amount of citations of this "Oh we're gonna... we should dump this person
in another country." So that's something that indicates, that this strategy of sort
of provoking a scandal paid off. But let's.. before we get into that, let's
look into the topics that were covered over the course of the campaign. We did
the same thing, we developed topic dictionaries with keywords for each
category and we let our script read through all the data and count
occurrences. So looking at this, we see a sort of band there in the 10% range,
where it's all a colourful rainbow, where the topics don't really diverge from each
other, except for that topic of domestic security, which
is there at the low end of the range. But we do have one topic, that stands out quite
considerably in the early months of the Wahlkampfsommer, which is European Union,
generally European Union topic. This is because on July 1st Helmut Kohl, the
eternal Chancellor, get the first European act of state and a lot of things were
written about his legacy in terms of the European Union and lots of people showed
up from Strasbourg and Brussels and paid their respects. This is why this topic
seems like.. or this is, why this topic comes in as strong as it does here. Now the
topic that has a sort of unusual curve here on our graph, is the topic of the
environment. Our dictionaries that we developed were topical and so what causes
this steep, steep summit there in early August, is the Dieselgipfel.. there, the
Diesel Summit, where German car manufacturers try to sort of get out of
the fact, that they basically ripped off customers with selling cars that emitted
toxic amounts of poisonous gas and dust. This is why this is extremely important in
the high.. in the low 40 % range in early August. But afterwards the trend
line points steeply down. A topic that was pretty consistent over
the course of the campaign in its overall dynamic or at the sort of.. not the
overall dynamic, but the role that it played, is the topic of immigration. And
immigration means migration and refugees in our case here. And now, thinking about
what that means in relation to our theory on priming, we would think that sure,
that's a topic that is owned by the AFD. It's, like, it's super tightly connected to
that party's rise. So, this is something that does favour a far-right party like
those are, like it is. But we can do a sort of more systematic investigation
into this. So, this graph shows you the poles: each dot represents polling results
for the AFD and the line is the average out of those polls, again over the course
of the of the time frame that we surveyed. Pretty much constant
until mid-August, and all of a sudden we have increasing variance and we have a tendency,
a trend line, that points upwards. And now, this is where the heart of the story lies:
is this, is this dependent on the mentions that the AFD got in the media?
There's the orange line, now we have a sort of we have a different, a different
scale of our graph, that's why it looks way more nervous than in the bigger one,
that we had. Difficult to say. If you have data like this, time serious data, you
actually want to get rid of trends, in terms of what the analysis should be like.
So one way to do this in a graphic representation, is by not showing the
absolute values and how they develop, but only showing the change from day to day
and plotting that. This is what this graph does. So here, these two lines dance around
the zero mark, because - especially the blue one, where it's the polling results - there
wasn't a lot of variation from day to day. It's in incremental steps that the curve
points up and down. It gets a bit more, a bit higher in variance around the.. after
the mid of August. And whereas the AFD mentions in the media, they stay, well, they
stay rich in variance. Hard to tell, if anything systematic is there. You would
think that after the sort of first, 3rd of August, those, those lines are
connected. We ran an analysis - a vector autoregression model, time series
statistics - we couldn't find any systematic relation in a timeframe, that
made sense for our theory on priming. Which is a few days that we're looking
for. So if you talk about time series, we talk about lag and lead, and so you try to
connect a data point that is further down the line with a data point that is, that is
not as far down the line, and nothing of statistical significance showed up here.
And this kind of stumped us - we thought, right, when we looked at this there was
something. That we.. we sort of took a step back and we considered another possibility
to.. as why to.. as to why the media reported as they did. Did the media just give
the people what the people wanted? And here is why I want to talk
to you about why this was a special election. This graph - I adapted
this graph from the Berliner Morgenpost and they based it on on surveys conducted
by Infratest dimap on to the.. the data I didn't have any access to them. But this
impressively shows, why there was a special election. In five out of the six preceding
elections, employment was the topic that was on top of people's minds, when they
made the decision in terms of which party to vote for. And employment means
unemployment. In 2017, with unemployment being at record lows, and after 2015
having.. or having a Syrian civil war still going on, we're having ...
refugees come into.. into Western and into Europe, immigration jumps on out as the.. as
the topic that was the most important for people. And here, if we if we look at also
the topics that are further down the important scale for voters, those are all
topics, where one could conceivably think that those can be spun in a way that they
are connected to this refugee situation. Social injustice, economic injustice, that's
something that a party like the AFD can very effectively turn into an idea on
group based conflict: "It's us versus them". Same with pensions: "Oh, those people come
here to take our jobs and our money, and especially from the old people. From our
elderly. So 2017, die Bundestagswahl 2017, is a special case, if we consider it
compared to other parties. So now having this situation where we find that it's,
it's something that basically never happened in recent history and in Germany
before in terms of what, what made people decide at the polls. We wondered, OK,
well, is there a way to more accurately measure this demand side of things, this
this need for information for.. of voters. And what better way there is to measure
some.. to measure the salience in the population than to look at Google queries?
So we collected Google Trends data - more specifically, the Google searches on
refugees, 'Flüchtlinge', general term,
and again, here's this.. this way to even out a trend
line - this is the daily change in how this topic developed. And if we put
our daily change of AFD mentions over that, we do see that there's something
there. There's some sort of systematic relationship. And then, crunching these
numbers and putting them again through a vector autoregression model, we come to
the conclusion, that with a lag of only one day, Google searches for refugees actually
lead AFD mentions in the media. So, if on Tuesday a higher number of people in
Germany googled "Refugees", on Wednesday, the AFD was mentioned more often than the day
before. The end effect wasn't big, but it was there and it was significant. We also, of
course, considered the alternative, and the magic word is here it's.. it's Granger
causality, so you can actually calculate, and reliably calculate, the temporal
succession, means that one follows the other. And so all of a sudden, it becomes
a bit difficult to point the fingers at the media. Because, if the media just
reacts to an interest, it operates like a business. If we like it or not. There's
the normative idea of the media, especially in a country that is rich in high-quality
publications as is Germany, that the media is a public good, that educates people and
brings out the best in them, in challenging them, and persuading them of
the best side of the argument. But at the end of the day, in your online worlds, it
is a business with a measurable outcome. You have clicks, you have trackers, we
have ad durations that you can measure. And so you can see, which articles are
favored and which articles people last the longest on. And we're not saying
- there's important distinction to make here - we're not saying, that there's a
direct causal link between people googling refugees and the media directly
reacts to that prompt, because there's some search engine optimization guy or
girl.. every media publishing house, that monitors what people are interested
in. We're saying, that there's an intermediate step there. It's not a
direct cause, it's just a sort of delay, that is in there, that allows for other
mechanisms to get in. So we're wondering: What about the consumer focusing
on the demand side? And in 2017, there's a few things that you could actually look at
to gauge what the demand-side demands, and we decided to focus on Twitter. Because,
without actually knowing this, when we first started out with collecting all this
data, we decided to set up, yeah, to set up a Twitter scraper. And that way, between
September 1st and September 24th, we collected 4.5 million tweets, that
contained keywords.. that contain any one of a list of keywords, that had
politic connotation. So looking at this body of data, we can extract things like
the top 200 most used Hashtags. And if we do that and we, we count the tweets that
contains one of the top 200 Hashtags and we pay special attention, to which one of
these Hashtags are decidedly pro AFD, we get to a number, that 30.9 % of the tweets
that contained any of those top 200 Hashtags, actually contain one that is in
favor of the AFD. Whereas if we count the decidedly no AFD, the anti AFD, no AFD in
all ways of spelling and capitalization and so forth, that's only 1.2 %.
And here it becomes a bit ticklish. So, in order to sort of give a
better idea, of what role Twitter might have played in our little, in our little
relationship here, between the demand side and the supply side, the supply side
supplying the news, we have a beautiful network graph. So this is a
retweeting network: this is we extract all the mentions of a.. of an actor. Each dot is
a Twitter user, each line is 5 or more retweets. Retweets, we're aware of that,
Retweets don't automatically mean endorsement - you might retweet something
that is outlandish and crazy. But for the sake of visualizing, what the weights are
on Twitter, we're treating them as the same. And anyone, who ever has worked
with network graphs of that size, that take a long time
to generate, and it's kind of tough to to label them, so I'm very proud,
that I was able to do so. If we look at this Island down there, that blob, that
blue blob - those are accounts, that cluster around AFD accounts. The coloring
here was done by a walk trap algorithm, I just adjusted the colors that
that algorithm used to actually match the colors in the, in the German party
landscape. And so we do have a hefty continent at the bottom right, that
connects all kinds of people to the AFD. There, if you look at the little
appendix below here, that is colored in brown, that is mainly organized around a
movement called Reconquista Europe, which is an even further right wing, right wing
movement that is sort of, like, directly tacked to this island of the AFD, and the
the connecting node is Björn Höcke, which is quite interesting. So we have the AFD down
there, we have the other parties up there, the rainbow, that is the pluralistic political
landscape, we have those.. those two extreme points there, at the at the super top right
and there at the bottom left - that is.. those are very extremely.. extreme Twitter
user parties. That's the ÖDP and the Freien Wähler, so they don't.. they don't seem to
engage with the nodes, that are in the center here. But what's also valiable to
note, is that for the other parties, for the established parties, starting from the left
and orange - the Pirate Party and then red the Social Democrats, Purple is Die Linke,
green die Grünen, yellow FDP and black the Conservative Party CDU/CSU. All of these
parties have a central node - a central, a central account, around which a lot of
other users are fanned out. So there's.. for each party, there's a smaller number, or a
relatively small number, of accounts, that are highly favored in how often they are
retweeted. AFD doesn't have that. Even.. so, this is of course a projection of
something that's 3D in a 2D place, so there might be
some skewing going on here, in terms of how it shows on our screen, but even turning it
and trying to identify which party is at the center, wasn't, wasn't really possible.
So the internal rifts, and the internal power struggles - they do show in how
members of the party are retweeted. Also interesting to note is which nodes, which
users are connecting these two continents, so to speak. One is, that blue dot, is
wahlrecht.de, a polling aggregator, of course, everyone is
interested in getting their polling numbers out. And there's.. that's tough to
see here, but there's a beige user in the middle therem which is welt.de, so
one of the media.. one of the media publications, that we actually collected
data on and surveyed. Another thing that is.. I'm just gonna mention here briefly, is
the.. that light pink colored insert between the greens and the central gray beige dot
- those are Jan Böhmermann, die Heute-show und Extra 3.
*laughing, clapping* Yeah, so there's a.. the dynamics are
clear, that we have this party that is pretty well organized on social media,
and thus is able to dominate a media agenda, that is based on algorithms basically.
If you think about how, how the logic of information dissemination works on
Twitter: with trending Hashtags. If you have a party that is as - well, I don't want
to say organized - but as tightly clustered around itself.. within itself as the AFD
shows up here, there's a good chance, that that will influence, what all of us get to
see, when we check out the Twitter homepage. Now I know, that probably a good chunk of
you have burning questions in their mind, and I'm gonna going to want to know - so
how many of these of these bright blue bar blobs are bots? Are Twitter bots. We tried to
find that out, using a tool called the Botometer, which is something that has an
API available online, where you can submit, it's a project from a research team
in Indiana, where you can submit the name of a Twitter user and then it gives you a..
it rends lots of lots of analyses and analysis lots of things
about this user: the frequency of tweets, the time at which it tweets, who is.. who
is it following, who is it followed by, who is it talking to, that kind of stuff. But
when I tried to submit that, I broke their API. And so, if they're happen to watch I
apologize, that was me. So it wasn't be able to do so in time, but there's a bunch of
talks tomorrow, that talk about exactly.. about that thing, so I'm happy to have
this sort of as a lead-in for the day tomorrow. So what can we.. go, what can we
take from this? The Bundestagswahl 2017 was a perfect storm for a far-right party like
the AFD. You had a high issue salience of the topic that is at the center of its
agenda, and you have a sort of unregulated Wild West of social media. We'll see
how that changes with recent law changes come into effect, where all of a
sudden the platform itself has some liability, to which kind of messages are
spread. But if that's effective for Twitter, is a whole other bag of
worms. So in that sense, that's why I was.. what I was sorting.. hinting at: in this
issue environment, we have people be interested in the topic that is central
for the party like the AFDs. The media behaved like pretty surprisingly..
surprisingly predictable? And did not.. at least for the.. for the
topics, or for the publications, that we covered, it did so. And for the context
that we're arguing herein, that the AFD only get like 20 % of the share
towards the end of the campaign, is something that is a little bit surprising.
And that also leads into a different question of what does this "Oh it's the
journalists fault!" actually mean? What does it really mean? This sort of is based
on this normative expectation of the media being an impartial.. an impartial
deliverer of information and if you think about what else is going on on the
internet, with alternative media and an alternative news sphere establishing
itself with news blogs like, well I don't wanna.. I don't want to call any
names, because.. and so, there's a sort of scene of far-right fringe blogs in Germany
that we also collected. And so we're.. further down the line,
we're going to look at what the topics were, that were covered in that and how
that connected to influencing public opinion in Germany, but having said this,
with these alternative ways of getting your news, information being available, if
you have the press, if you have the mainstream press, not covering a party like
the AFD to a certain extent, you only give the fodder to those cries of
"Lügenpresse", mendacious press, in members of the population, that are sort of
at the risk of being lost as audience members.
So, it's kind of difficult to call the.. to call the shots here and actually point
the fingers at the media, because they delivered on informing on an interest that
existed in the in the population, before they reported on something like the AFD.
And with this, I want to leave it at that. I thank you very much for your attention
and I'm highly, highly eager to hear questions and prompts and ideas, how we
could pursue this further.
*applause*
Herald: Vielen Dank, thank you very much. Questions? [unintelligible] any questions?
Feel free to attend the microphones. Even the microphone I don't
see behind the cameras. Let's start with number two. *laughs*
Mic 2: [unintelligible] some sound. Thank you. Thank you very much for your
amazing work. I've got only one question. Do you plan on releasing those
collected data and on what license? Beyer: That's a question that we.. that
we asked ourselves, too. We would love to collect the data and ultimately it will
happen, but we have to make sure, that we actually have the right to do so, with the
way we collected it. But we're definitely looking into that.
Herald: OK, number 5. Yeah, you. Mic 5: OK. Hello. Is this working? Yeah. It's
tempting - I'm from the Netherlands - to compare these experiences with the AFD
with the experience in the Netherlands. You know, we had Wilders, we had Verdonk
we had Fortuyn, now we have Baudet and it seems that there is a major difference
between.. with the AFD, because presently, I have frankly, I don't know the name of
the leader of the AFD, it used to be Frauke Petry and now, I don't know.
But in the Netherlands, the leaders of the.. those populist right-wing parties, they
were.. they were very good in manipulating the media. They were sending out messages
sustaining a "Köder", in Germany, what's the word? Like, um, provocating, sending
out provocations and that attracted attention of the media. So, there are
people saying that you shouldn't react on all provocations, but anyway they were
geared to draw attention and I wonder, whether AFD has been to the same extent
active in the field of drawing attention, purposely using even agencies that are
specialized in advertising. Beyer: Great question. There is this idea,
that the AFD was very skillful at sort of inscenating scandal and purposely doing
things on a public stage that would draw attention to them. For example, this..
yeah, I say it again.. this expression by Alexander Gauland, to dispose
of a German politician, or the other leading candidate Alice Weidel leaving a
talk show, while it was being broadcast. So there's.. there definitely is this
element of the.. of actually taking a scandal and using it for your own, for
pushing your own agenda, whereas if they used ad agencies for their media campaign,
they did, their campaigning was highly professionalized, in terms of what their
posters were and how their campaign ads were worked.
And they did work with a company, that also was involved with Donald Trump's campaign.
But in terms of.. sort of new media or like online media – it's not that new
anymore – and in terms of what they did on online media, I.. I only have an
anecdotal sense, if they use something like bots, which is also a way of buying,
buying attention. I can.. I can sort of tell you about one specific case, where
we investigated, which Twitter users were the most active in tweeting on the AFD on
German Twitter – tomorrow's a talk about a Twitter user called Ballerina, which is
a name that has been out there which.. there's great education, that that is
definitely a bot, that has been planted and has been controlled by someone else or
by sort of.. by any group of actors that is not actually a ballerina.
What we found was a Twitter user called Teletubbies007, that tweeted in those three
weeks, that we surveyed, 6.500 times and mostly just retweeted, retweeted calls to
go and cast your ballot, that were all put out by the central AFD accounts. And it
didn't have a lot of followers, like something 500 or so, but it just kept
retweeting over and over and over and over. And when we actually wanted to check out
the page of that bot, it was deleted, the user was deleted.
So there's, to answer your question, um, this high.. this degree of
personalization that the Partij voor de Vrijheid has in the Netherlands is not
as extreme for the AFD in Germany, because there's more leading candidates and
there's internal rifts like Geerd Wilders is basically his own party. That's not the
same. But the strategy to use scandal and to use something that is outrageous and
push the boundaries a little bit more, then jump back and say "Oh no, we did not
mean that at all in this way", that is the exact same spot on strategy they used.
Mic 5: Perhaps I should add that Wilders made it like..
Herald: Excuse me, many people queuing. Mic 5: Okay. Then I'll stop.
Herald: Okay, thank you. We have questions from the internet, then.
Signal Angel: Yes. (?) is asking: "Why did you come to the conclusion that this
was a special election, while the last election in Austria has exactly the same
issues? Don't you see this as some sort of an global effect?"
Beyer: That's true, a Syrian civil war that pushes people to flee from,
from war and save their livelihood, is something that is not only felt in
Germany, but for the context of Germany, it's a special election. That's.. this sort
of situations never.. has never occurred in this way before. But absolutely, each
election in Europe basically since 2015 was a special election in that sense. But
not in terms of the outcomes, in a way, that.. because far-right parties in other
European countries already had, had their foot in the door and especially in Austria,
where.. with the FPÖ were pretty well established with previously having been
part of a government. And now being part of the government again. But
for Germany, in what the issues were, that were top of people's minds: that's the
special case that I meant. Herald: OK, microphone number 3, please.
Mic 3: Thank you, first I really appreciate the sincerity and transparency
of your talk, thank you very much, we need more of this in such circumstances and
maybe less polemics sometimes. There's just a little trifle in your method, where
I was wondering: how did you filter the "Linke" and "Grüne" stuff. Did you..
yeah, how exactly did you do it? Did you maybe count all the mentions of "Grün"
with a capital and non-capital "G", and "Linke" with a capital L and non-capital
and then filter it out further? Or did you do it the other way around? I know, that
you focused specifically on the AFD stuff, and maybe you were focused on representing
all the parties that might be relevant. But I would still be interested in that
part, thanks. Beyer: That's a great question. The thing
is, that we used.. when we actually put all that.. when after we collected text, before
we put it through the unloading methods, we put it all into lowercase.
Just so we could have a consistent way of analyzing. And with capitalization, it's
kind of.. sometimes it just trips up the way to treat this. And that's why you
ran into these issues with "Linke und Grüne" where we had to resort to only
taking basically the candidates names and then also "Linke Partei" and "Grüne
Partei" and a few conjugations, so "der Linken Partei", "den".. right, like grammatically..
the cases, we only, like, we conjugated them through. Yeah, but we.. since our focus
was on the AfD, we weren't especially concerned with that, which is
unfortunate, I admit that, but for the purpose of this talk, we decided to just
use this workaround. Mic 3: OK, thanks.
Herald: OK. Microphone six, please.
Mic 6: Hello, thanks for your interesting presentation.
I'm wondering if you and your team.. so, you'd.. you looked at mentions
of the different parties, but I'm wondering if you looked at the content of the articles
and how they talked about it, if they were talked about positively or negatively.
Beyer: Thank you very much, that's a great
question, that we actually did consider. And I'll answer this question with a
counter question, as social scientists like to do. Anyone in this room use Amazon
Mechanical Turk and works on hits to earn a few cents here and there? No? OK, so I
can speak freely. There's a.. there's a method that uses cheap labor on Amazon
Mechanical Turk and presents each worker with two sentences, out of which they have
to change the one that is more positive. And so we wanted to use this to train a
machine learning algorithm to actually get a way to gauge the sentiment of positive
and negative in the text that we had collected. We started that in early
December and we had a, like, a workbook with 4.000 so-called hits, 4.000 little jobs,
4.000 comparisons and when this job was done, five or six days later, we sort of put
that through a test and compared it with our own hand-coding that we had done.
And it turned out that one worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk spent over seven hours and
worked.. of those 4.000 little jobs that we had, he worked 3.980.
And over 1.400 of which he did in less than two seconds.
Which is unfortunate, because: a) this person.. so, this person - right, "Person?, Question
Mark" - probably used a script, probably used a bot or just randomly clicked. The
coding didn't match up at all with what we did hand-wise ourselves and that really
screwed up our approach there. If any of you plan on doing some hits in the new
year for Amazon Mechanical Turk and you're asked to compare two sentences that
mention a political actor in Germany, you can send me an email and maybe a
screenshot and tell me how much you appreciate that we're paying six cents for
each comparison. But that's the story, why we haven't.. we don't have any sentiment in
this analysis here. Herald: [unintelligible]
Mic ?: Hello. I'm from Denmark, so in this context, I'm very much a ghost of
Christmas future. *Beyer laughs*
Mic ?: In your Twitter data,
where you take Retweets as well, do you determine what are quotes and what
are direct Retweets? Because in my experience, and I work with this in Denmark
and in the UK, a lot of people like to distance themselves from what the AfD and
similar are saying by quoting everything they're saying and giving them the press.
Beyer: That's a very good point to make. We did not make any distinction
between quotes and Retweets, but we did filter, based on 5 Retweets, by thinking:
OK, if you occasionally feel like you have to point something out that is
outrageous and ridiculous, that a person, a member of a party, says on Twitter, you
would be inclined to do so less than a certain amount of time. We also tried it
with other cut-offs. The graph basically always looked the same. But if we think
about what this means for how the demand- side is influenced, it doesn't matter.
Basically, if you're retweeting out of endorsement or out of ... out of ...
Mic ?: Spite. Beyer: ... out of spite, that's right.
That's the logic, why we decided to use mentions and Retweets.
Mic ?: Thank you. Herald: Another question
from the internet? Signal: Yes. Luke23 is asking: Do you
think that the window of commonly acceptable ideas, the so-called Overton
window, was shifted to the right by the ideas of the AfD echoed in the media?
Beyer: That's a good question. That's a good question. Something that comes to
mind here, is that media use is epiphenomenal - you're sort of
likely.. but the question is, like: Do you think.. does something happen in you,
because you use a certain media outlet, or do you use a certain media outlet, because
something happened in you ? From the sense that I got, I would say that
the degree to what is.. what is acceptable, definitely was shifted over the course of
this campaign, that all of a sudden we're questioning, if remembering the Holocaust
should be something that is at the heart or very close to German identity.
That's something that a political scientist would have never expected, that
this cleavage can be opened up again in a way that is so potent as it did now. So it
definitely did something to the overall discourse in Germany. Whereas that is an
effect of media reporting on the AFD, would require us to use something like
this.. the sentiment analysis, to actually determine how the media talked about which
aspect of the AFD agendas.
Herald: I can see some movement behind microphone number 8. I'm sorry. *laughs*
Mic 8: Thank you very much. Thank you for your work, I still do have a critical
question. Basically, the things you showed is something like we all know, yeah? We
could see this happening last year, and so - I mean this year, in the last election. So
I am wondering now, whether the method you used, which was basically focusing on
quantity, is in a sort of mirroring what was happening. And I'm wondering if you
would work.. keep working on it. Like, you used buzzwords and you used "the media"
instead of, like, narrowing it down, or more.. using more specific questions and I was
wondering, if you have these results now and you have proof for them? What are your next
questions and how can you continue to use these.. the data you have, to make it more
specific, so we can really have some outcome and some conclusions coming from this?
Beyer: It's a absolutely wonderful question.
Of course, we thought about using this data further down the line. We.. our
initial plan was, to connect this not just with salience data that we derive from
Google searches. We also have Facebook data that we
collected, that we wanted to look into, but there.. it's a bit challenging, to
actually analyze comments in depth onto language, because language tends to be way
more fluid and you have certain problems with selection and self-selection. So you
really, really have to be careful to cross- connect, which person that comments on
Facebook is the same person and thus, if you only do quantitative stuff, would
appear disproportionally. As I mentioned, we have also collected data from far-right
blogs, from "news" blogs, that very actively endorsed the AFD and their topics
and so we're planning to pull this into the analysis along with data from the
German Longitudinal Election Study, where in this time frame, that we surveyed, in the
data, each day 100 people in Germany were called up and asked about their feelings
toward specific parties and actors. So we actually have day-by-day data, once it
comes out, on how people.. what people thought about those actors. So we're
planning to pull that in, as a more reliable measure for salience.
Herald: Thank you very much. I'm very sorry, but time's up, so there will be no
more questions right now in front of the audience. Alexander Beyer, thank you very
much. A warm applause, please. *applause*
Beyer: Thank you. *applause continues*
*postroll music*
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