Changing Patterns in Anti-Systemic and Far-Right Messaging in German, Danish, and Swedish Social Media Posts during COVID-19

And the final speaker in this last session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Frederik Henriksen, with a paper on the transformation of the digital far right as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a focus on anti-immigration arguments it moved towards an anti-establishment angle; it also transformed and coordinated organisationally; and found new topics especially in anti-vaccination discourse as a widely popular topic.

The far right is an umbrella term for the radical and extreme right, and the emergence of far-right digital ecosystems has been widely recognised. Common to this ecosystem is an anti-system attitude, which rejects the dominant political order, and variously involves ideological (e.g. anti-democratic views) and relational (coalition and propaganda strategies) attributes. Conditions for this are a questioning of meta-politics (the basic arrangement of the political regime) and a lack of visible cooperative interactions. This may be similar to populism, but more ephemeral – it is not an ideology in its own right.

During the pandemic, there were reactive movements, with renegade leaders, who engaged in what we might understand as defensive publics, illiberal publics, and/or anti-systemic counterpublics. Their discursive shifts represent localised appropriations that reframe topics or events – this happened previously with the 2015 European refugee crisis, and then again with the COVID-19 pandemic. Such discursive shifts exercise a form of discursive power.

The project therefore set out to examine the shifts in discourses and the accounts that drove them over the course of 2019-22, and the role of anti-systemic messaging in such discourses. It gathered some 41 million social media posts from 28,000 accounts from Facebook, Twitter, Gab, VKontakte, Reddit, YouTube, and Telegram in Danish, Swedish, and German.

Using manual and computational coding, the analysis of these posts identified seven far-right discourse dimensions, five of which were highly visible: Xenophobia, Islamophobia, Authoritarianism, anti-progressive and anti-left, and far-right conspiracy; and three anti-systemic dimensions: anti-government, anti-globalism, and anti-mainstream news. The prevalence of these fluctuated over time; anti-government discourses were strong for instance during major COVID-19 lockdowns.

Anti-systemic messaging increased overall during this time, though overall there was a high stability of messaging patterns: far-right accounts did not really shift towards anti-systemic messaging, and the increase in anti-systemic messaging is therefore due more to an influx of new accounts into these discourses. Such anti-systemic messaging is strongly related to authoritarianism, anti-progressivism, and far-right conspiracies; it is negatively correlated with Islamophobia.

There was thus an increase in anti-systemic messaging with the start of the COPVID-19 pandemic, especially in Germany; this was predominantly driven by the influx of new accounts. This points to some degree of affective polarisation, perhaps also as a result of a decline in trust in political systems and mainstream news media during the pandemic. It remains unclear whether this actually transforms into discursive power.