ABSTRACT
Part II, “Nationalism on Social Media”, applies the theoretical foundations to two case studies. Chapter 6 presents the first case study. It analyses how Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were used for communicating nationalism in the context of the German federal elections of 2017.
The German federal elections to the Bundestag in 2017 took place in the midst of a crisis of the European Union, the refugee crisis, and the expansion and intensification of nationalism and right-wing extremism throughout the world.
Data were collected in the days and weeks before the German election from three data sources: Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Two streams of data were collected from Twitter. The first one collected tweets posted by the main contending parties and politicians that mentioned keywords such as nation, Volk (the people), Germany, migration, foreigners, Europe, Brexit, Greece, and Islam or Muslim. The second Twitter dataset used the same keywords in combination with hashtags at two key points of time during the election campaign, when major media events took place: (a) the only TV debate between Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) and SPD frontrunner Martin Schulz that ARD broadcast on 2 September; and (b) the TV debate between the frontrunners of the other five main contending parties: Joachim Herrmann (CSU), Christian Lindner (FDP), Cem Özdemir (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), Sahra Wagenknecht (Die Linke), and Alice Weidel (AfD). The result was a dataset consisting of 31,474 tweets.
For collecting data from Facebook and YouTube, relevant channels of the main contending politicians and parties were identified. The collection of comments from Facebook and YouTube was conducted on 25 September 2017, one day after the Bundestag election. A total of 6,422 comments were collected from seven relevant Facebook postings. A total of 1,032 comments were collected from two YouTube videos.
Macro discourse topics were identified as a preparation for the data analysis: the German nation, the European Union, refugees and migrants in Germany, and Islam. Using methodological tools from critical discourse analysis, the structure of the four discourse topics was analysed. Critical theories of nationalism, as outlined in previous chapters of this book, were used for understanding the ideological structure of the analysed case in the broader context of the contemporary political economy of capitalism.
