Mapping Alternative News Environments on Diverse Platforms

The final speaker in this ECREA 2022 session is presented by Eva Mayerhöffer and Jakob Bæk Kristensen, who start from the same interest in alternative media and digital counterpublics, understanding the latter especially as the digital environments that are established by the sharing of alternative media content and exploring their inward or outward orientation.

Alternative news environments, then, are constituted by those actors who have shared the same alternative URLs either directly or by on-sharing other actors’ shares. The project worked with a sample of some 160 left-wing, right-wing, and ideologically different alternative news media across Germany, Austria, Sweden, and Denmark (with Germany and right-wing outlets most prominent); it explored the sharing of such content from January 2019 to March 2022 on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, 4chan, Reddit, YouTube, and VKontakte, identifying some 130,000 actors in total that shared the URLs related to these sites (and then gathering information on what other content they also shared, I think – that part wasn’t quite clear).

These alternative news environments are least mainstream-oriented in Germany, and most in Denmark; this is different again for left-wing and right-wing alternative news environments, though. The German and Swedish networks appear to be more fragmented, but also with more bridge-building between these networks. The fringe and mainstream are closer for Germany and Sweden than for Austria and Denmark in these alternative news environments, even in spite of Germany’s post-war tradition of actively excluding extremist groups from mainstream media and politics.

Some German alternative news environment clusters very actively also included the mainstream media, for instance; this was true especially for conspiracist-centred clusters (so such sharing could also indicate critical engagement, perhaps). The blending of such environments in Germany and Sweden could point to more mature alternative news environments in Germany and Sweden.