My Truth is My Castle - Mapping and Understanding Networks of Truth Contestation on Austrian, Czech, German, and Polish Facebook during the Pandemic

One of the most pressing issues concerning today's political environment is an increasing relativization of truth in public discourses. Politicians challenge their opponents by accusing them of lying and manipulating the people, while creating their own versions of a “truer” reality. Such truth contestation nurtures political polarisation and thus contributes to societies drifting apart to potentially irreconcilable degrees. It is accelerated by social media, through which politicians gain unmediated access to the people in a homophilic environment, easily reaching users with similar views and ties. It is important to map and trace truth contestation in these environments to gain a better understanding of who is taking part in these discourses, which issues accommodate truth contestation more easily, and how the two variables (actors and issues) interact. We use a discourse network approach to investigate the dynamics of truth contestation as well as the actors driving it, looking particularly at the role of government actors who are central in developing and implementing policies and their communication to the public. Our study is based on an original dataset of 4,902 manually coded truth claims raised by government and opposition party leaders on Facebook in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland; truth claims are best understood as evaluations of truthfulness or accusations of untruthfulness. Specifically, we take the first year of the pandemic (March 2020 - February 2021) as a case in point to better understand truth contestation in a context of crisis, i.e., uncertainty, increased need for information, and a window of opportunity for political contestation of governmental crisis policies. All four cases, while subject to the same crisis condition, dealt differently with the challenges of the pandemic and were met in different states of domestic politics, potentially resulting in different varieties of truth contestation. Overall, our results shed light on (coalitions of) driving forces of truth contestation across four different political contexts. We contribute to the literature on post-truth discourses, misinformation and disinformation as well as fake news in terms of discourse dynamics between executives and opposition politicians during crisis.