Delegating Polarization? – An Analysis of Post-Comment-Interaction in the Social Media Communication of the Right Wing Party Afd

For several years, communication in social media has become a basic channel of presenting and expressing political statements. Furthermore, platforms like Instagram or Facebook played an important role in recent discussions regarding either the spreading of fake news or misinformation campaigns through targeted advertising. While there has been an increasing research focus on the amount and consequences of fake news in social media there is also a profound need to discuss more opaque communication strategies of populist movements and parties. Nevertheless, the focus on the question whether postings are false or true ignores the important role of other subtler communication strategies for ideological or attitudinal polarization in social media. Therefore, it is imperative to take visual elements into account which are a basic tool of communication in social media. In order to discuss the processes of subtle polarization the paper proposes a theoretical framework to analyse the interaction between posts and comments instead of analysing postings or comments separately. It provides a better understanding of social media posts and comments as an interdependent discursive formation which might contribute to polarization. Two aspects will be addressed which are located on two different analytical levels of discourse: The first is the level of post-comment-interaction as a genuine partisan discourse, the second will focus on the interaction between the partisan discourse and the public discourse. The paper argues that the integrated analysis of postings and comments helps to understand the mechanisms behind populist communicative strategies and polarization in social media. Given the focus on populist communication, I concentrate my analysis on social media communication by the german right-wing party AfD. I use content (posts and comments) produced on the Facebook fanpage of the right-wing party AfD during the German Federal Election campaign 2017 between January and September 2017. The data will be analysed with qualitative methods in the tradition of the Documentary Method and Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD). I expect populist parties to apply communicative strategies to their social media communication that I call ideological attachment: While being nearly flawless on the written level, social media postings still can serve as anchor points for radical political ideologies which are mostly embedded in the visual parts of the postings. The expressive display of invectivity and hate speech becomes visible on the level of comments not the post itself. Polarization, understood as a process of diminishing rhetoric variety in a discursive formation, is therefore the result of a delegation tactic. This strategy achieves two functions at once, which shall be called memefication of public and mass media discourse. On the one hand, it creates an opportunity for sympathisers to ideas and ideologies which might polarize the partisan discourse. On the other hand, it allows for an engagement in the public mass discourse with a relatively professional and factual vocabulary. Due to the still relatively high integrated German media environment the integration in and interaction with the mass-media discourse is imperative and cannot be ignored even by right wing parties like the AfD.