The political discourse in Western European countries such as Germany hasrecently seen a resurgence of the topic of refugees, fueled by an influx ofrefugees from various Middle Eastern and African countries. Even though thetopic of refugees evidently plays a large role in online and offline politicsof the affected countries, the fact that protests against refugees stem fromthe right-wight political spectrum has lead to corresponding media to be sharedin a decentralized fashion, making an analysis of the underlying social andmediatic networks difficult. In order to contribute to the analysis of theseprocesses, we present a quantitative study of the social media activities of acontemporary nationwide protest movement against local refugee housing inGermany, which organizes itself via dedicated Facebook pages per city. Weanalyse data from 136 such protest pages in 2015, containing more than 46,000posts and more than one million interactions by more than 200,000 users. Inorder to learn about the patterns of communication and interaction among usersof far-right social media sites and pages, we investigate the temporalcharacteristics of the social media activities of this protest movement, aswell as the connectedness of the interactions of its participants. We findseveral activity metrics such as the number of posts issued, discussion volumeabout crime and housing costs, negative polarity in comments, and userengagement to peak in late 2015, coinciding with chancellor Angela Merkel'smuch criticized decision of September 2015 to temporarily admit the entry ofSyrian refugees to Germany. Furthermore, our evidence suggests a low degree ofdirect connectedness of participants in this movement, (i.a., indicated by alack of geographical collaboration patterns), yet we encounter a strongaffiliation of the pages' user base with far-right political parties.
展开▼
