Inhaltszusammenfassung

The campaign for the German parliament (Bundestag) 2017 was finally the one in which party strategists and observers regarded social media not just as experimental and in essence peripheral venues, but rather as important arenas where elections are won or lost. The year before, Donald Trump won the presidency in the U.S., which was attributed to his authentic Twitter use and a skillful mobilization of supporters via social media. Right-wing populist forces on the rise in Germa...The campaign for the German parliament (Bundestag) 2017 was finally the one in which party strategists and observers regarded social media not just as experimental and in essence peripheral venues, but rather as important arenas where elections are won or lost. The year before, Donald Trump won the presidency in the U.S., which was attributed to his authentic Twitter use and a skillful mobilization of supporters via social media. Right-wing populist forces on the rise in Germany like the AfD or Pegida similarly use social media to bypass media gatekeepers and reach sympathetic target audiences (Stier, Posch, Bleier,& Strohmaier, 2017). So-called “fake news”, social bots (semi-automated accounts) and online propaganda (e.g., orchestrated by Russia), accompanied by a growing mistrust of legacy media in the wake of the refugee crisis threatened to impact the campaign. The agenda-setting power of online media (Russell Neuman, Guggenheim, Mo Jang, & Bae, 2014) became apparent when an online campaign led by party activists helped to propel Martin Schulz and the SPD to a parity with the CDU in public opinion polls in March 2017 (“Schulzzug”). In the campaigning arena, parties applied innovations like micro-targeting at a larger scale in order to harness the persuasive potential of social media. Importantly, the intense – maybe even overproportional – coverage of the aforementioned phenomena by the mass media contributed to the perception of an increased political role of social media.» weiterlesen» einklappen

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Klassifikation

DFG Fachgebiet:
Sozialwissenschaften

DDC Sachgruppe:
Politik