Which Online Counter-Publics on Facebook are Fostering Agonistic Respect? An Assessment of Counter-Publics Debating Germany’s Refugee Policy

Abstract

Online publics offer new spaces for actors to counteract hegemonic narratives within mainstream publics. At the same time, they can also offer spaces for anti-pluralist movements to delegitimise their political opponents—which threatens the agonistic respect modern democracies are dependent on. This paper aims to show whether counter-publics on Facebook do in fact foster or threaten such respect. To do so, the posts of 1465 public Facebook pages and groups debating refugee policy in Germany were downloaded and analysed. Using network analysis, I identified the largest eight communities of pro- and contra-refugee pages. Using discourse analysis, I found that, on the contra-refugee side, agonistic respect for opposing positions was sparse, even in moderate pages, while on the pro-refugee side, agonistic respect is shown more often within more moderate and activist pages. I discuss possible causes for this divergence and argue how further research could enhance these findings.

KEYWORDS:

• counter-publics
• network analysis
• agonistic pluralism
• discourse analysis

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Appendices A, B and C are accessible through the online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2020.1804121.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The keywords used were: Flüchtl*, Geflücht*, Asyl*, Zuwander*, Illegal*, Flucht*, Flüchtend*, Migrant*, Einwander*, Refug*.

2 Communities, here, is a technical term and does not refer to communities in the sociological sense, i.e. it does not denote a shared identity between the pages grouped together. In the context of network analysis, communities are defined as “groups [of nodes] such that there is a higher density of edges within groups than between them” (Clauset, Newman and Moore 2004, 1).

3 A more in-depth assessment about how the different pages construct their opponents can be found in Appendix B – conspiracy theory pages offered patterns that need to be investigated separately, for this paper I focus on describing the patterns observed within pro- and contra-refugee pages. All Facebook posts cited in this paper can be found in Appendix C.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rainer Freudenthaler

Rainer Freudenthaler is a Research and Teaching Associate and PhD candidate at the Department of Media and Communication Studies, University of Mannheim.