The Cross-Platform Activities of the German Far Right on Social Media

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the excellent Baoning Gong, whose interest is in the social media activities of the German far right across a range of platforms: Twitter, Telegram, and Gettr. This cross-platform focus is important because they all form part of a far-right online ecosystem, but single-platform studies still dominant the research literature. Far-right actors are well-known for moving between platforms if their accounts are banned from any one platform.

Baoning’s work explores the opportunity structures of these three platforms for far-right movements, then: the specific configurations of technological communicative, regulatory, economic, and user practice dimensions across these platforms. Telegram and Gettr provide regulatory, economic, and user practice opportunities: they have minimal moderation processes and therefore serve as unregulated spaces for the emergence and maintenance of far-right community. Twitter, meanwhile, offers a venue connecting to mainstream audiences, even though – in its previous incarnation – it was a great deal more restrictive in providing a space for far-right activists.

This study selected a broad range of German far-right actors and organisations and traced their cross-platform activities in 2022 and the start of 2023, expanding from a set of seed accounts through snowball sampling and capturing their ideology and actor type. On Twitter, this identified several clusters of accounts, from international and US far-right groups through conservative mainstream media and politicians, anti-elite and Querdenker accounts, anti-elite, conservative, and reactionary media and political figures, right-wing alternative media, journalists, and commenters, and far-right social movements and groups – but outright neo-Nazis remained a small and distinct fringe groups.

On Telegram, there was a greater mix of accounts, and unique here are QAnon conspiracy channels and pro-Russian war commentary channels; on Gettr, structures resembled Twitter more than Telegram, with strong representation for the US far right and anti-elite and Querdenker communities.

Across all three platforms, there is a connection of far-right core clusters both in Germany (involving movements, activists, and the far-right AfD community) and in the US and internationally (centred on key US far-right actors). Platforms are used alongside each other both to connect these communities and to address the specific interests and needs of particular communities. This also provides opportunities for different polarisation and radicalisation dynamics.