34C3 - Pointing Fingers at 'The Media'

34C3 preroll music

Herald: The next speaker is born and

raised in Germany. He lives and works as a
PhD student in Canada as a member of a

research group on extremist politics in
democratic systems and he'll give us an

insight into the public discourse in
Germany focused on the so called

"Alternative für Deutschland". Please
welcome Alexander Beyer.

applause

Beyer: Thank you very much. Thank you
people, for showing up in the Saal Borg,

thank you, the internet, for watching, a
very big thank you for the organizers, for

giving me the opportunity to, to give this
little talk. Yeah, my name is Alexander

Beyer and everywhere I went this winter, I
didn't have to wear a winter jacket

because the temperatures were very mild
and I will tell you in a minute why that

matters.
As I already said, I'm a member of a

research group in Vancouver, where we look
at what happens, how extremist parties and

politics fare in democratic systems and
we decided to focus this research project

on the fascinating - for researchers
fascinating - case of Germany and asking

the questions, if we can point fingers and
is it a viable, a valid

judgment to say, the media, the
media is to blame for the rise of the AfD?

For anyone who, who decided at the end of
2017 that they would spend most of 2016 in

hibernation - which seemed like a pretty
good idea at the time - I will give a

quick rundown what happened: So, we had
election in September and the domino

piece that was Germany fell. Domino piece
in a sense, that all around in Europe far-

right parties had considerable success in
the past, in the recent past, and Germany

was the sort of last stalwart in
Central Europe, where a far-right party did

not get at the government, this
happened in September and it did not only

get into government, er, into Parliament, it
also, the way that it looks like now, it

might become the official leader of the
opposition.

So, when these results came in, pundits
were really, really quick to call the

shots.
The, the dominating sentiment was, that it

was the media's fault: They took the
positions of the AfD and gave

disproportionate amounts of coverage to
this far-right extremist party. And this

sentiment had a lot of truthiness to it.
So, it had a lot of: "Yeah, sure, I can see

why", right, everyone that opened his
newspaper or opened a news website,

stories about the AfD seemed, or about
anything.. about something that's related

to the AfD, seemed to dominate coverage.
This went along with a little bit of a

felt truth, a truth that was perceived by
people, about how the campaigning season

was a lot of season and not a lot of
campaigning, despite Martin Schultz's best

efforts.
A whole lot of sunshine, but not a lot of

conflict and this was something that then
was perceived to be very, uh, well, I don't

want to say very skillfully, but somehow
filled by the AfD and and the topics that

are of concern to this party.
So what are we doing today here? First

off, I'm a political scientist by trade
and political scientists like theory. I

know that this is an event, where [I] figure
you might not at the forefront of

everyone's minds, but it is for me,
because talking and arguing to political

scientists about theory is kind of like
mud-wrestling with a pig: you do that for

two or three hours and then you realize,
oh, this pig actually enjoys this. So I'll

be sort of, I have one slide on what we,
what previous theories would suggest

has, have happened and how it could have
happened and then I'll show you what kind

of data we have collected, to
systematically answer this question and

talk about public discourse in Germany and
then to the meat and potatoes of the talk,

about how the campaign unfolded in the
media and I will than, to end I will show

some more data, that is a bit different,
that paints a picture on why this election

was a special election and why it was sort
of a perfect storm of an election for a

far-right party and why this actually
makes us claim that the media could be

said to have behaved pretty reasonable. As
a little teaser.

OK. Theory. One slide. Two possible
mechanisms of media effects. There's this

normative, very endearing and wonderful
idea, that if you read something, that

someone carefully crafts and he or she
constructs an argument, that is well

written, well made, you read this, you take
it in, you're persuaded by that,

regardless of what this argument is. 60
years of media research suggests, that this

doesn't happen.
Pre-existing opinions are extremely

difficult to change in each and every
single one of us, even though we're likely

to admit that "No, no sure, I'm a rational
thinker, I take standpoints if they're

convincing to me and I internalize them.",
but it's not how this works.

The second possible effect, and the one
that will be of of concern to us today at

the core of the presentation, is something
that's called Priming. So, the media can't

tell people what to think, it can't
persuade people independently of the

previous opinions that people have, but
it's really, really successful in telling

people, what to think about. It's super
good, the media is super good, reading

something is very effective in bringing
something to the front of your mind.

And here I.. here I can tell you, why I
told you about my my choice of attire in

winter. A vast majority of you probably
thought when I said this "'Oh, I didn't

have to wear a winter jacket', wow, what's..
who is this guy?" But maybe a few of you

thought "Yeah, sure it was pretty mild,
that's climate change."

So, without naming the issue, I..
there's a chance, that I primed a few of

you, to consider climate change and pull
that in your frontal lobe, at the front of

your mind.
This is, this is important, this is a.. the

central thing, that we have to consider if
we ask, if the media wrote up a party like

the AfD.
Also important to consider here is, that

priming is easier - or there's an indirect
effect of priming as well - where a topic

that is owned by a specific party, that's
the thing that then favors the party

subsequently.
So, if the media writes a lot about

refugees, a xenophobic far-right party,
that has this problem of refugees at the

core of their agenda, will reap in benefits
in our minds, in that it's agenda will be,

will fall on fertile ground.
So far the theory, that's all. So, what did

we do based on this theory? We collected
data, lots of data, we have.. we understand this

data.. we understand this text, that we
collected to be data and we use natural

language processing to analyze that.
Natural Language Processing basically

means, that we're giving language to a
computer that wasn't written specifically

to be understood by a computer and try to
extract meaningful analysis based on what

the computer is doing with this.
So, we used some sifting methods to

collect about 8.500 articles from four
central German news websites: Focus, Bild,

Welt and Spiegel. And we have.. that
results in a unique data set, that, to our

knowledge, no one else has. If so, please
reach out to us.

And this was so unique, that it deserves at
least six fire emojis. It was also pretty

exciting because, that was pretty cheap. We
were two people that were mainly concerned

with collecting this data and I don't want
to, I don't want to calculate my hourly

wage, but it was almost done with no
financial expense. And this is cool,

because we're social scientists, we're
faced with this problem, with this very

interesting case of Germany sort of
falling in line, very delayed, with lots of

other countries around it - in terms of
the far-right party getting their seats in

Parliament and we can use methods that are
available to us, if we're sort of like

sitting down and reading our stack
overflow and sort of teaching those

methods to us, to systematically try to
answer this question.

Let's dive right in. The share of party
mentions in online news. So, what we did

for each day, we calculated what the total
number of mentioned political actors is.

We did that based on word lists, that we
carefully crafted, that included candidate's

names and party abbreviations and party
names and things like "Kanzlerin" and

"Kanzlerkandiat" for the CDU/CSU and the
SPD respectively and we let that thing rip

through our little rscript that we have.
So, the average of mentions of each party

over the course of the campaign looks
something like this: Between July 1st and

September 24th - that's the time frame
that we concentrated on - we see a clear

incumbency bonus, the "Kanzlerbonus" the
"Kanzlerinbonus" for the CDU/CSU, social

democrats high twenties, and the AfD at
10.7 %. Here we might say at smaller

parties.. a little note to the green and
the left, so with this dictionary method is

kind of tricky, because we can't say: "Oh yeah,
well we just gonna count every occurrence

of Grüne and Linke" for the Green Party and
the Left Party, because then we get stuff

like 'the green banana' and 'the left hand'
that is counted for them. So that's why

here we're only using candidates' names.
That's why they probably.. they sort of

underperform. But for our purpose of
talking about why the AFD got favored by

the media, we're sort of letting that drop
under the table. So, the story here is

over the course of the campaign, 10.7 % of
mentions were happening that mentioned the

AFD, basically. Case closed. Right, AFD got
12.7 % in the election. That doesn't really

sound like it was favored by the media.
And a few of you might know this analysis

from a blog post, that me and Constanze
Kurz wrote for Netzpolitik, sort of like 45

seconds after the election, when we worked
on truncated data. And we also focused on

print media and this is sort of what this
graph looked like, that we based our

conclusion on. AFD didn't really get any
disproportionate amount of coverage. It

actually is in the.. in the last week of the
campaign.. last weeks of the campaign

actually is outperformed by the FDP.
Science is the current state of airing, or

the.. so, now that we have better data in
terms of online news data this whole story

looks a bit different. If we take the
average over the whole course of the

campaign and actually have it shown to
us.. Stay by the day - This is what I want

to focus on now.
So just looking at the sort of tail end of

this all the way to the right, when we get
close to the election date, the order of

this is surprisingly close to the actual
election results. The parties actually do

get in the order, that they came out of
the election. But we do see a little curve

that gets closer to a curve that should be
bigger. And this is where the.. well, I

don't want to say magic, but this is
where the interesting stuff lies. So let's

look at the curves one after the other.
The CDU/CSU, as you would expect, as the

incumbent anything that is remotely
political in domestic and international

politics, will score mentions for the
Chancellor and the CDU/CSU. That's why

this curve is considerably higher than the
others, but we do see a downward tendency

the closer we get to the campaign, when
campaign coverage shifted from the

incumbent to the competitors. Especially
the underdog competitors. Which is kind..

that's a bad transfer to the SPD
now, but if we look at the curve of the

Social Democratic Party, there's a slight
bump around August and Martin Schulz

really tried to drive home this issue of
justice as the central campaign promise

and there's another little slight
humper on September 1st, begin of

September, when the televised debate
happened, but the overall trend is pretty

linear, doesn't seem to be, if we would
just smooth this plot out to be a straight

line, it probably would be pretty much
horizontal. Not so for the AFD. So

remember, over the course of the campaign
they got 10.7 % on average of mentions

drinks from his bottle
And that's true. If we calculate an

average of that, of course, this looks like
it scores considerably lower than the two

major parties. But something happens in
late August and all of a sudden this party

gets actually close to the Social
Democrats. It like.. starting in late

August, the tendency becomes one, that is
pretty considerably upwards. And if we

take the average of only the two last
weeks before the election, we get to a

number of 19.6 of all mentions are talking
about the AFD there. Which is something, if

you think about the mechanisms of priming,
those are short term effects. We're

looking for things that happen over a
short term or have an effect in a pretty

short term. So this is something that is
extremely important. At the beginning of

this time frame, where the plot becomes
something that has a trend that shows

upwards, around, like, August 28th - where
that first little mountain.. first little

summit occurs - two things happened: one, a
refugee boat capsized in the

Mediterranean. An event that we've sadly
and.. have to see terrifyingly often and

one of the people died. And the second
thing that happened was, that Alexander

Gauland in an interview claimed, that a
German politician should be dumped in

Anatolia. And it's interesting, if you talk
about.. if you extract the topics, that

are covered in relation to the AFD before
and after this moment.

Before this August 28th, it's a lot about
Alice Weidel writing emails where it turns

out, she's not the public persona that she
claims she is and it's a lot about

internal rifts of this far-right party.
The internal tensions between the super

far right wing and the far right or right
wing-wing and afterwards, there's a

surprising amount of citations of this "Oh
we're gonna... we should dump this person

in another country." So that's something
that indicates, that this strategy of sort

of provoking a scandal paid off. But
let's.. before we get into that, let's

look into the topics that were covered
over the course of the campaign. We did

the same thing, we developed topic
dictionaries with keywords for each

category and we let our script read
through all the data and count

occurrences. So looking at this, we see a
sort of band there in the 10% range,

where it's all a colourful rainbow, where
the topics don't really diverge from each

other, except for that
topic of domestic security, which

is there at the low end of the range. But
we do have one topic, that stands out quite

considerably in the early months of the
Wahlkampfsommer, which is European Union,

generally European Union topic. This is
because on July 1st Helmut Kohl, the

eternal Chancellor, get the first European
act of state and a lot of things were

written about his legacy in terms of the
European Union and lots of people showed

up from Strasbourg and Brussels and paid
their respects. This is why this topic

seems like.. or this is, why this topic comes
in as strong as it does here. Now the

topic that has a sort of unusual curve
here on our graph, is the topic of the

environment. Our dictionaries that we
developed were topical and so what causes

this steep, steep summit there in early
August, is the Dieselgipfel.. there, the

Diesel Summit, where German car
manufacturers try to sort of get out of

the fact, that they basically ripped off
customers with selling cars that emitted

toxic amounts of poisonous gas and dust.
This is why this is extremely important in

the high.. in the low 40 % range in
early August. But afterwards the trend

line points steeply down.
A topic that was pretty consistent over

the course of the campaign in its overall
dynamic or at the sort of.. not the

overall dynamic, but the role that it
played, is the topic of immigration. And

immigration means migration and refugees
in our case here. And now, thinking about

what that means in relation to our theory
on priming, we would think that sure,

that's a topic that is owned by the AFD.
It's, like, it's super tightly connected to

that party's rise. So, this is something
that does favour a far-right party like

those are, like it is. But we can do
a sort of more systematic investigation

into this. So, this graph shows you the
poles: each dot represents polling results

for the AFD and the line is the average
out of those polls, again over the course

of the of the time frame that we surveyed.
Pretty much constant

until mid-August, and all of a sudden we have
increasing variance and we have a tendency,

a trend line, that points upwards. And now,
this is where the heart of the story lies:

is this, is this dependent on the
mentions that the AFD got in the media?

There's the orange line, now we have a
sort of we have a different, a different

scale of our graph, that's why it looks
way more nervous than in the bigger one,

that we had. Difficult to say. If you have
data like this, time serious data, you

actually want to get rid of trends, in
terms of what the analysis should be like.

So one way to do this in a graphic
representation, is by not showing the

absolute values and how they develop, but
only showing the change from day to day

and plotting that. This is what this graph
does. So here, these two lines dance around

the zero mark, because - especially the blue
one, where it's the polling results - there

wasn't a lot of variation from day to day.
It's in incremental steps that the curve

points up and down. It gets a bit more, a
bit higher in variance around the.. after

the mid of August. And whereas the AFD
mentions in the media, they stay, well, they

stay rich in variance. Hard to tell, if
anything systematic is there. You would

think that after the sort of first, 3rd
of August, those, those lines are

connected. We ran an analysis - a vector
autoregression model, time series

statistics - we couldn't find any
systematic relation in a timeframe, that

made sense for our theory on priming.
Which is a few days that we're looking

for. So if you talk about time series, we
talk about lag and lead, and so you try to

connect a data point that is further down
the line with a data point that is, that is

not as far down the line, and nothing of
statistical significance showed up here.

And this kind of stumped us - we thought,
right, when we looked at this there was

something. That we.. we sort of took a step
back and we considered another possibility

to.. as why to.. as to why the media reported
as they did. Did the media just give

the people what the people wanted?
And here is why I want to talk

to you about why this was a
special election. This graph - I adapted

this graph from the Berliner Morgenpost
and they based it on on surveys conducted

by Infratest dimap on to the.. the data
I didn't have any access to them. But this

impressively shows, why there was a special
election. In five out of the six preceding

elections, employment was the topic that
was on top of people's minds, when they

made the decision in terms of which party
to vote for. And employment means

unemployment. In 2017, with unemployment
being at record lows, and after 2015

having.. or having a Syrian civil war still
going on, we're having ...

refugees come into.. into Western and into
Europe, immigration jumps on out as the.. as

the topic that was the most important for
people. And here, if we if we look at also

the topics that are further down the
important scale for voters, those are all

topics, where one could conceivably think
that those can be spun in a way that they

are connected to this refugee situation.
Social injustice, economic injustice, that's

something that a party like the AFD can
very effectively turn into an idea on

group based conflict: "It's us versus them".
Same with pensions: "Oh, those people come

here to take our jobs and our money, and
especially from the old people. From our

elderly. So 2017, die Bundestagswahl 2017,
is a special case, if we consider it

compared to other parties. So now having
this situation where we find that it's,

it's something that basically never
happened in recent history and in Germany

before in terms of what, what made people
decide at the polls. We wondered, OK,

well, is there a way to more accurately
measure this demand side of things, this

this need for information for.. of voters.
And what better way there is to measure

some.. to measure the salience in the
population than to look at Google queries?

So we collected Google Trends data - more
specifically, the Google searches on

refugees, 'Flüchtlinge',
general term,

and again, here's this..
this way to even out a trend

line - this is the daily change in
how this topic developed. And if we put

our daily change of AFD mentions over
that, we do see that there's something

there. There's some sort of systematic
relationship. And then, crunching these

numbers and putting them again through a
vector autoregression model, we come to

the conclusion, that with a lag of only one
day, Google searches for refugees actually

lead AFD mentions in the media. So, if on
Tuesday a higher number of people in

Germany googled "Refugees", on Wednesday, the
AFD was mentioned more often than the day

before. The end effect wasn't big, but it
was there and it was significant. We also, of

course, considered the alternative, and the
magic word is here it's.. it's Granger

causality, so you can actually calculate,
and reliably calculate, the temporal

succession, means that one follows the
other. And so all of a sudden, it becomes

a bit difficult to point the fingers at
the media. Because, if the media just

reacts to an interest, it operates like a
business. If we like it or not. There's

the normative idea of the media, especially
in a country that is rich in high-quality

publications as is Germany, that the media
is a public good, that educates people and

brings out the best in them, in
challenging them, and persuading them of

the best side of the argument. But at the
end of the day, in your online worlds, it

is a business with a measurable outcome.
You have clicks, you have trackers, we

have ad durations that you can measure.
And so you can see, which articles are

favored and which articles people
last the longest on. And we're not saying

- there's important distinction to make
here - we're not saying, that there's a

direct causal link between people googling
refugees and the media directly

reacts to that prompt, because there's
some search engine optimization guy or

girl.. every media publishing house,
that monitors what people are interested

in. We're saying, that there's an
intermediate step there. It's not a

direct cause, it's just a sort of delay,
that is in there, that allows for other

mechanisms to get in. So we're
wondering: What about the consumer focusing

on the demand side? And in 2017, there's a
few things that you could actually look at

to gauge what the demand-side demands, and
we decided to focus on Twitter. Because,

without actually knowing this, when we
first started out with collecting all this

data, we decided to set up, yeah, to set up
a Twitter scraper. And that way, between

September 1st and September 24th, we
collected 4.5 million tweets, that

contained keywords.. that contain any one of
a list of keywords, that had

politic connotation. So looking at this
body of data, we can extract things like

the top 200 most used Hashtags. And if we
do that and we, we count the tweets that

contains one of the top 200 Hashtags and
we pay special attention, to which one of

these Hashtags are decidedly pro AFD, we
get to a number, that 30.9 % of the tweets

that contained any of those top 200
Hashtags, actually contain one that is in

favor of the AFD. Whereas if we count the
decidedly no AFD, the anti AFD, no AFD in

all ways of spelling and capitalization
and so forth, that's only 1.2 %.

And here it becomes a bit
ticklish. So, in order to sort of give a

better idea, of what role Twitter might
have played in our little, in our little

relationship here, between the demand side
and the supply side, the supply side

supplying the news, we have a
beautiful network graph. So this is a

retweeting network: this is we extract all
the mentions of a.. of an actor. Each dot is

a Twitter user, each line is 5 or more
retweets. Retweets, we're aware of that,

Retweets don't automatically mean
endorsement - you might retweet something

that is outlandish and crazy. But for the
sake of visualizing, what the weights are

on Twitter, we're treating them as the
same. And anyone, who ever has worked

with network graphs of that size, that
take a long time

to generate, and it's kind of
tough to to label them, so I'm very proud,

that I was able to do so. If we look at
this Island down there, that blob, that

blue blob - those are accounts, that
cluster around AFD accounts. The coloring

here was done by a walk trap
algorithm, I just adjusted the colors that

that algorithm used to actually match the
colors in the, in the German party

landscape. And so we do have a hefty
continent at the bottom right, that

connects all kinds of people to the
AFD. There, if you look at the little

appendix below here, that is colored in
brown, that is mainly organized around a

movement called Reconquista Europe, which
is an even further right wing, right wing

movement that is sort of, like, directly
tacked to this island of the AFD, and the

the connecting node is Björn Höcke, which
is quite interesting. So we have the AFD down

there, we have the other parties up there, the
rainbow, that is the pluralistic political

landscape, we have those.. those two extreme
points there, at the at the super top right

and there at the bottom left - that is..
those are very extremely.. extreme Twitter

user parties. That's the ÖDP and the
Freien Wähler, so they don't.. they don't seem to

engage with the nodes, that are in the
center here. But what's also valiable to

note, is that for the other parties, for the
established parties, starting from the left

and orange - the Pirate Party and then red
the Social Democrats, Purple is Die Linke,

green die Grünen, yellow FDP and black the
Conservative Party CDU/CSU. All of these

parties have a central node - a central, a
central account, around which a lot of

other users are fanned out. So there's.. for
each party, there's a smaller number, or a

relatively small number, of accounts, that
are highly favored in how often they are

retweeted. AFD doesn't have that. Even.. so,
this is of course a projection of

something that's 3D in a
2D place, so there might be

some skewing going on here, in terms of how
it shows on our screen, but even turning it

and trying to identify which party is at
the center, wasn't, wasn't really possible.

So the internal rifts, and the internal
power struggles - they do show in how

members of the party are retweeted. Also
interesting to note is which nodes, which

users are connecting these two continents,
so to speak. One is, that blue dot, is

wahlrecht.de, a polling
aggregator, of course, everyone is

interested in getting their polling
numbers out. And there's.. that's tough to

see here, but there's a beige user in
the middle therem which is welt.de, so

one of the media.. one of the media
publications, that we actually collected

data on and surveyed. Another thing that
is.. I'm just gonna mention here briefly, is

the.. that light pink colored insert between
the greens and the central gray beige dot

- those are Jan Böhmermann, die Heute-show
und Extra 3.

laughing, clapping
Yeah, so there's a.. the dynamics are

clear, that we have this party that is
pretty well organized on social media,

and thus is able to dominate a media
agenda, that is based on algorithms basically.

If you think about how, how the logic of
information dissemination works on

Twitter: with trending Hashtags. If you
have a party that is as - well, I don't want

to say organized - but as tightly clustered
around itself.. within itself as the AFD

shows up here, there's a good chance, that
that will influence, what all of us get to

see, when we check out the Twitter homepage.
Now I know, that probably a good chunk of

you have burning questions in their mind,
and I'm gonna going to want to know - so

how many of these of these bright blue bar
blobs are bots? Are Twitter bots. We tried to

find that out, using a tool called the
Botometer, which is something that has an

API available online, where you can submit,
it's a project from a research team

in Indiana, where you can submit the name
of a Twitter user and then it gives you a..

it rends lots of lots of analyses and
analysis lots of things

about this user: the frequency of tweets,
the time at which it tweets, who is.. who

is it following, who is it followed by, who
is it talking to, that kind of stuff. But

when I tried to submit that, I broke their
API. And so, if they're happen to watch I

apologize, that was me. So it wasn't be
able to do so in time, but there's a bunch of

talks tomorrow, that talk about exactly..
about that thing, so I'm happy to have

this sort of as a lead-in for the day
tomorrow. So what can we.. go, what can we

take from this? The Bundestagswahl 2017 was a
perfect storm for a far-right party like

the AFD. You had a high issue salience of
the topic that is at the center of its

agenda, and you have a sort of unregulated
Wild West of social media. We'll see

how that changes with recent law
changes come into effect, where all of a

sudden the platform itself has some
liability, to which kind of messages are

spread. But if that's effective for
Twitter, is a whole other bag of

worms. So in that sense, that's why I was..
what I was sorting.. hinting at: in this

issue environment, we have people be
interested in the topic that is central

for the party like the AFDs. The media
behaved like pretty surprisingly..

surprisingly predictable?
And did not.. at least for the.. for the

topics, or for the publications, that we
covered, it did so. And for the context

that we're arguing herein, that the AFD
only get like 20 % of the share

towards the end of the campaign, is
something that is a little bit surprising.

And that also leads into a different
question of what does this "Oh it's the

journalists fault!" actually mean? What
does it really mean? This sort of is based

on this normative expectation of the media
being an impartial.. an impartial

deliverer of information and if you think
about what else is going on on the

internet, with alternative media and an
alternative news sphere establishing

itself with news blogs like, well I
don't wanna.. I don't want to call any

names, because.. and so, there's a sort of
scene of far-right fringe blogs in Germany

that we also collected.
And so we're.. further down the line,

we're going to look at what the topics
were, that were covered in that and how

that connected to influencing public
opinion in Germany, but having said this,

with these alternative ways of getting
your news, information being available, if

you have the press, if you have the
mainstream press, not covering a party like

the AFD to a certain extent, you only give
the fodder to those cries of

"Lügenpresse", mendacious press, in
members of the population, that are sort of

at the risk of being lost as audience
members.

So, it's kind of difficult to call the..
to call the shots here and actually point

the fingers at the media, because they
delivered on informing on an interest that

existed in the in the population, before
they reported on something like the AFD.

And with this, I want to leave it at that.
I thank you very much for your attention

and I'm highly, highly eager to hear
questions and prompts and ideas, how we

could pursue this further.

applause

Herald: Vielen Dank, thank you very much.
Questions? [unintelligible] any questions?

Feel free to attend the microphones.
Even the microphone I don't

see behind the cameras. Let's start with
number two. laughs

Mic 2: [unintelligible] some sound.
Thank you. Thank you very much for your

amazing work. I've got only one question.
Do you plan on releasing those

collected data and on what license?
Beyer: That's a question that we.. that

we asked ourselves, too. We would love to
collect the data and ultimately it will

happen, but we have to make sure, that we
actually have the right to do so, with the

way we collected it. But we're definitely
looking into that.

Herald: OK, number 5. Yeah, you.
Mic 5: OK. Hello. Is this working? Yeah. It's

tempting - I'm from the Netherlands -
to compare these experiences with the AFD

with the experience in the Netherlands.
You know, we had Wilders, we had Verdonk

we had Fortuyn, now we have Baudet and it
seems that there is a major difference

between.. with the AFD, because presently,
I have frankly, I don't know the name of

the leader of the AFD, it used to be
Frauke Petry and now, I don't know.

But in the Netherlands, the leaders of the..
those populist right-wing parties, they

were.. they were very good in manipulating
the media. They were sending out messages

sustaining a "Köder", in Germany, what's the
word? Like, um, provocating, sending

out provocations and that attracted
attention of the media. So, there are

people saying that you shouldn't react on
all provocations, but anyway they were

geared to draw attention and I wonder,
whether AFD has been to the same extent

active in the field of drawing attention,
purposely using even agencies that are

specialized in advertising.
Beyer: Great question. There is this idea,

that the AFD was very skillful at sort of
inscenating scandal and purposely doing

things on a public stage that would draw
attention to them. For example, this..

yeah, I say it again.. this
expression by Alexander Gauland, to dispose

of a German politician, or the other
leading candidate Alice Weidel leaving a

talk show, while it was being broadcast. So
there's.. there definitely is this

element of the.. of actually taking a
scandal and using it for your own, for

pushing your own agenda, whereas if they
used ad agencies for their media campaign,

they did, their campaigning was highly
professionalized, in terms of what their

posters were and how their campaign ads
were worked.

And they did work with a company, that also
was involved with Donald Trump's campaign.

But in terms of.. sort of new media or
like online media – it's not that new

anymore – and in terms of what they did on
online media, I.. I only have an

anecdotal sense, if they use something like
bots, which is also a way of buying,

buying attention. I can.. I can sort
of tell you about one specific case, where

we investigated, which Twitter users were
the most active in tweeting on the AFD on

German Twitter – tomorrow's a talk about a
Twitter user called Ballerina, which is

a name that has been out there which..
there's great education, that that is

definitely a bot, that has been planted
and has been controlled by someone else or

by sort of.. by any group of
actors that is not actually a ballerina.

What we found was a Twitter user called
Teletubbies007, that tweeted in those three

weeks, that we surveyed, 6.500 times and
mostly just retweeted, retweeted calls to

go and cast your ballot, that were all put
out by the central AFD accounts. And it

didn't have a lot of followers, like
something 500 or so, but it just kept

retweeting over and over and over and over.
And when we actually wanted to check out

the page of that bot, it was deleted,
the user was deleted.

So there's, to answer your question, um,
this high.. this degree of

personalization that the Partij voor
de Vrijheid has in the Netherlands is not

as extreme for the AFD in Germany, because
there's more leading candidates and

there's internal rifts like Geerd Wilders
is basically his own party. That's not the

same. But the strategy to use scandal and
to use something that is outrageous and

push the boundaries a little bit more,
then jump back and say "Oh no, we did not

mean that at all in this way", that is
the exact same spot on strategy they used.

Mic 5: Perhaps I should add that Wilders
made it like..

Herald: Excuse me, many people queuing.
Mic 5: Okay. Then I'll stop.

Herald: Okay, thank you. We have questions
from the internet, then.

Signal Angel: Yes. (?) is asking: "Why
did you come to the conclusion that this

was a special election, while the last
election in Austria has exactly the same

issues? Don't you see this as some sort of
an global effect?"

Beyer: That's true, a Syrian civil war
that pushes people to flee from,

from war and save their livelihood, is
something that is not only felt in

Germany, but for the context of Germany,
it's a special election. That's.. this sort

of situations never.. has never occurred in
this way before. But absolutely, each

election in Europe basically since 2015
was a special election in that sense. But

not in terms of the outcomes, in a way,
that.. because far-right parties in other

European countries already had, had their
foot in the door and especially in Austria,

where.. with the FPÖ were pretty well
established with previously having been

part of a government. And now
being part of the government again. But

for Germany, in what the issues were, that
were top of people's minds: that's the

special case that I meant.
Herald: OK, microphone number 3, please.

Mic 3: Thank you, first I really
appreciate the sincerity and transparency

of your talk, thank you very much, we need
more of this in such circumstances and

maybe less polemics sometimes. There's
just a little trifle in your method, where

I was wondering: how did you filter the
"Linke" and "Grüne" stuff. Did you..

yeah, how exactly did you do it? Did you
maybe count all the mentions of "Grün"

with a capital and non-capital "G", and
"Linke" with a capital L and non-capital

and then filter it out further? Or did you
do it the other way around? I know, that

you focused specifically on the AFD stuff,
and maybe you were focused on representing

all the parties that might be relevant.
But I would still be interested in that

part, thanks.
Beyer: That's a great question. The thing

is, that we used.. when we actually put all
that.. when after we collected text, before

we put it through the unloading
methods, we put it all into lowercase.

Just so we could have a consistent way of
analyzing. And with capitalization, it's

kind of.. sometimes it just trips up the
way to treat this. And that's why you

ran into these issues with "Linke und
Grüne" where we had to resort to only

taking basically the candidates names and
then also "Linke Partei" and "Grüne

Partei" and a few conjugations, so "der Linken
Partei", "den".. right, like grammatically..

the cases, we only, like, we conjugated
them through. Yeah, but we.. since our focus

was on the AfD, we weren't especially
concerned with that, which is

unfortunate, I admit that, but for the
purpose of this talk, we decided to just

use this workaround.
Mic 3: OK, thanks.

Herald: OK. Microphone six,
please.

Mic 6: Hello, thanks for your interesting
presentation.

I'm wondering if you and your team..
so, you'd.. you looked at mentions

of the different parties, but I'm wondering
if you looked at the content of the articles

and how they talked about it, if they were
talked about positively or negatively.

Beyer: Thank you very much, that's a great

question, that we actually did consider.
And I'll answer this question with a

counter question, as social scientists
like to do. Anyone in this room use Amazon

Mechanical Turk and works on hits to earn
a few cents here and there? No? OK, so I

can speak freely. There's a.. there's a
method that uses cheap labor on Amazon

Mechanical Turk and presents each worker
with two sentences, out of which they have

to change the one that is more positive.
And so we wanted to use this to train a

machine learning algorithm to actually get
a way to gauge the sentiment of positive

and negative in the text that we had
collected. We started that in early

December and we had a, like, a workbook with
4.000 so-called hits, 4.000 little jobs,

4.000 comparisons and when this job was
done, five or six days later, we sort of put

that through a test and compared it with
our own hand-coding that we had done.

And it turned out that one worker on Amazon
Mechanical Turk spent over seven hours and

worked.. of those 4.000 little jobs
that we had, he worked 3.980.

And over 1.400 of which
he did in less than two seconds.

Which is unfortunate, because: a) this
person.. so, this person - right, "Person?, Question

Mark" - probably used a script, probably
used a bot or just randomly clicked. The

coding didn't match up at all with what we
did hand-wise ourselves and that really

screwed up our approach there. If any of
you plan on doing some hits in the new

year for Amazon Mechanical Turk and you're
asked to compare two sentences that

mention a political actor in Germany, you
can send me an email and maybe a

screenshot and tell me how much you
appreciate that we're paying six cents for

each comparison. But that's the story, why
we haven't.. we don't have any sentiment in

this analysis here.
Herald: [unintelligible]

Mic ?: Hello. I'm from Denmark, so in this
context, I'm very much a ghost of

Christmas future.
Beyer laughs

Mic ?: In your Twitter data,

where you take Retweets as well, do you
determine what are quotes and what

are direct Retweets? Because in my
experience, and I work with this in Denmark

and in the UK, a lot of people like to
distance themselves from what the AfD and

similar are saying by quoting everything
they're saying and giving them the press.

Beyer: That's a very good point to make.
We did not make any distinction

between quotes and Retweets, but we did
filter, based on 5 Retweets, by thinking:

OK, if you occasionally feel like you
have to point something out that is

outrageous and ridiculous, that a person,
a member of a party, says on Twitter, you

would be inclined to do so less than a
certain amount of time. We also tried it

with other cut-offs. The graph basically
always looked the same. But if we think

about what this means for how the demand-
side is influenced, it doesn't matter.

Basically, if you're retweeting out of
endorsement or out of ... out of ...

Mic ?: Spite.
Beyer: ... out of spite, that's right.

That's the logic, why we decided to use
mentions and Retweets.

Mic ?: Thank you.
Herald: Another question

from the internet?
Signal: Yes. Luke23 is asking: Do you

think that the window of commonly
acceptable ideas, the so-called Overton

window, was shifted to the right by the
ideas of the AfD echoed in the media?

Beyer: That's a good question. That's a
good question. Something that comes to

mind here, is that media use is
epiphenomenal - you're sort of

likely.. but the question is, like: Do you
think.. does something happen in you,

because you use a certain media outlet, or
do you use a certain media outlet, because

something happened in you ?
From the sense that I got, I would say that

the degree to what is.. what is acceptable,
definitely was shifted over the course of

this campaign, that all of a sudden we're
questioning, if remembering the Holocaust

should be something that is at the heart
or very close to German identity.

That's something that a political
scientist would have never expected, that

this cleavage can be opened up again in a
way that is so potent as it did now. So it

definitely did something to the overall
discourse in Germany. Whereas that is an

effect of media reporting on the AFD,
would require us to use something like

this.. the sentiment analysis, to actually
determine how the media talked about which

aspect of the AFD agendas.

Herald: I can see some movement behind
microphone number 8. I'm sorry. laughs

Mic 8: Thank you very much. Thank you for
your work, I still do have a critical

question. Basically, the things you showed
is something like we all know, yeah? We

could see this happening last year, and so -
I mean this year, in the last election. So

I am wondering now, whether the method you
used, which was basically focusing on

quantity, is in a sort of mirroring what
was happening. And I'm wondering if you

would work.. keep working on it. Like, you
used buzzwords and you used "the media"

instead of, like, narrowing it down, or more..
using more specific questions and I was

wondering, if you have these results now and
you have proof for them? What are your next

questions and how can you continue to use
these.. the data you have, to make it more

specific, so we can really have some outcome
and some conclusions coming from this?

Beyer: It's a absolutely wonderful
question.

Of course, we thought about using
this data further down the line. We.. our

initial plan was, to connect this not just
with salience data that we derive from

Google searches.
We also have Facebook data that we

collected, that we wanted to look into,
but there.. it's a bit challenging, to

actually analyze comments in depth onto
language, because language tends to be way

more fluid and you have certain problems
with selection and self-selection. So you

really, really have to be careful to cross-
connect, which person that comments on

Facebook is the same person and thus, if
you only do quantitative stuff, would

appear disproportionally. As I mentioned,
we have also collected data from far-right

blogs, from "news" blogs, that very
actively endorsed the AFD and their topics

and so we're planning to pull this into
the analysis along with data from the

German Longitudinal Election Study, where
in this time frame, that we surveyed, in the

data, each day 100 people in Germany were
called up and asked about their feelings

toward specific parties and actors. So we
actually have day-by-day data, once it

comes out, on how people.. what people
thought about those actors. So we're

planning to pull that in, as a more
reliable measure for salience.

Herald: Thank you very much. I'm very
sorry, but time's up, so there will be no

more questions right now in front of the
audience. Alexander Beyer, thank you very

much. A warm applause, please.
applause

Beyer: Thank you.
applause continues

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