What Explains Negative Attitudes towards Social Media in Germany?

The last speakers in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session are Christian Strippel and Sophie Jokerst, whose interest is in the democratic potentials of social media. They begin by introducing the results from the Weizenbaum Institute’s panel survey – which in Germany produced generally positive views of the overall impact of the Internet on society, but far more mixed views on social media in particular. What drives this, and how does it affect political participation online?

Heavy consumption of media affects perceptions of the social world, especially if personal experience is congruent with these perception. These patterns may also be at play in perceptions of social media in the present case, if mass media coverage of social media is negatively biased and audiences have no personal experience to contradict this bias. In turn, such attitudes towards social media may then also affect whether and how people use social media for political participation.

Using the Weizenbaum panel data, the study showed that use of TV and radio actually had a positive effect on social media use; active social media use had further positive impacts on assessments of social media. General social media use also had positive effects on use of social media for political participation. This makes the overall negative perception of social media in Germany difficult to explain: it appears that the negative perceptions are mainly amongst non-users, but it is not clear why these non-users hold such attitudes (and media coverage does not seem to play a significant role here).