The Evolution of Topics in German Alternative Media Pages on Facebook

The next paper in this ECREA 2022 session is by Svenja Boberg and colleagues, but presented by proxy; it focusses on the growing attacks against mainstream media (as ‘lying media’ or ‘Lügenpresse’ in Germany) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Central to this are also alternative news media sites that present their own views as a corrective to the mainstream. In Germany, these are deeply rooted in right-wing and populist communities, and are supportive of counter-hegemonic attitudes, including to COVID-19 containment measures. But the alternative media spectrum is complex: there is a continuum of outlets from mainstream-style outlets (via people who also publish opinion columns in mainstream news) through state influence actors like RT Deutsch to outright conspiracy sites.

There is thus some stylistic co-orientation between these sites, and personal connections between them, and between them and the mainstream, and they engage with mainstream content as a necessary point of reference for their alternative views. But how do these forms of content spread across the alternative news media landscape? What topics do they address, and are these stable or do they change over time?

The present study collected Facebook posts via CrowdTangle during October 2018 to August 2022, focussing on the posts of some 37 German-language alternative media outlets (but with the added complication that some of these were suspended or changed their names along the way) – these were predominantly right-wing pages, with a smaller number of left-wing pages and one Russian state propaganda outlet. Their post were then processed through structural topic modelling, and that way coded the posts for the (possibly multiple) topics they addressed).

Unsurprisingly, the topic of war emerges most strongly with the Russian attack on Ukraine; there is also a strong focus on COVID-19 from 2020 onwards. Constant throughout is a focus on societal debates (e.g. ‘cancel culture’ and other culture war topics), general news (with a focus on refugees and natural disasters), and the economy. Such persistent topics also have some fairly stable targets (mainstream media, politicians, climate activists, etc.), but while early in the time period there is a strong focus on supposed problems with migrants this shifts considerably first to COVID-19 and then to the war in Ukraine and its consequences for the economy and energy security.

High-reach outlets focus especially on the economy, COVID-19, the 2021 federal election, and moral panics; Russian outlets focus on the Ukraine war, international politics, crime, street protests, and COVID-19; leftist outlets focus on press agency news and left alternative media. There’s still a need to explore how such topics might move through the overall alternative media ecology. There certainly appears to be a co-orientation between RT Deutsch and high-reach outlets.