Cross-Platform Networks of Digital Counterpublics in Denmark and Sweden

Up next in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference panel is Eva Mayerhöffer, on digital counterpublics in Sweden and Denmark. Her project defined and identified a category of alternative news media: quasi-journalistic hybrid organisations that can foster the inward as well as outward orientation of digital counterpublics. The dissemination of this content can be liberating for one’s personal information flows, but can also disseminate potentially detrimental information. Its mapping can help map the structures of digital counterpublics.

This structure examines the alternative news environment that the sharing of content from these sites through various social media platforms creates. In doing so, it observes the processes of gatewatching and curation that the sharers of such content engage in, and explores what types of curation and curators are present here. These types might also differ across countries, platforms, and ideological orientations.

The project identified some 27 Swedish and 22 Danish alternative news media, across the political spectrum, and engaged in two-degree snowball sampling of the sharing of their content on nine social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, 4chan, Reddit, Gab, YouTube, and VKontakte. It analysed the curators and news communities engaging with this content, across these platforms.

The Swedish environment appeared broader and more mature than the Danish: influential curators in Sweden are more readily sharing alternative news content than their Danish counterparts (who stick more to generic news sources). Alternative news-sharing clusters in these networks tend more right-wing in both countries, with patterns in Sweden again more pronounced and covering a broader range of social media platforms.

Communities in Denmark are primarily political (with the exception of one COVID-sceptical group), while the Swedish landscape is more diverse: explicitly political groups are largely related to the far-right Sweden Democrats, and other groups address more specific issues aligned mostly with the far right (immigration, antifeminism, anti-left environmentalism, and various ‘truther’ groups).

Content sharing from these outlets is largely embedded with sharing of other news content; there is little evidence of actual news curation, and this content is used instead mainly as a supplement to fringe party and movement content.