The Digital Mediation of Legitimacy Conflicts

The third speaker in this Social Media & Society 2018 session is Lea Stahel, who begins with the story of two Muslim schoolkids in a Swiss school, who refused to shake the hand of their female teacher for cultural reasons. This was settled quickly within the school itself, but was raised again out of context by online media coverage some three months after the event, demonstrating how non-mediated and mediated contexts can diverge in the digital age.

There is a perception of legitimacy at the macro-level that influences particular publics’ judgments and actions, and that is affected in turn by these judgments and actions. This is complicated by the context collapse that is facilitated by social media and other environments, which facilitate the overlap of different publics that may have different perceptions of what actions and behaviours are legitimate and which are not.

Lea captured mainstream and alternative news and social media content on the handshake affair, as well as the official legal protocol dealing with the original case, and performed an analysis of the metadata and thematic content of these materials. In the original school context, legitimacy construction remained limited: a meeting between the kids’ family and the school principal addressed the issue, and it was resolved that the kids would not share hands with any teachers, to preserve both their cultural concerns and the Swiss state’s commitment to non-discrimination on gender grounds.

The mediated construction of legitimacy was more complicated: some 280 news articles and 96 blog posts as well as 1,563 online user comments addressed the issue, but this took place only some three months after the event itself and continued for two years in total, with articles posted by outlets and users around the world. This also implies a more diverse range of judgments on the issue (beyond religion and gender equality): news content was 66% descriptive, while 33% introduced judgments against bureaucracy or gender oppression; 28 blog posts were descriptive, 10% copied judgments, and 62% discussed Islam as a threat to the West, suggested sanctioning the kids or principal, or critiqued overreactions or discrimination against Muslims; 100% of the user comments coded were also judgmental.

Soon after this media coverage, the story changed again, and shaking hands with teachers was now made obligatory in Swiss schools, while the kids’ family’s application for naturalisation as Swiss citizens was suspended. All of this shows the increasing digital mediation of local legitimacy.