Navigating Hostile Digital Environments: Organised Interests, Hate Speech, and Digital Competencies

Digital political engagement increasingly unfolds in platform environments marked by rising levels of hate speech, discriminatory language, automated accounts, and AI-generated content. At the same time, politicians, civil society organisations or interest groups are expected to maintain continuous visibility across multiple social media platforms. Research on digital inequality has largely focused on citizens’ access and skills, while implicitly assuming that organised actors possess the digital competencies required to operate effectively in digital environments. This paper challenges this assumption and argues that digital competencies are unevenly distributed among organised interests as well, constituting an overlooked source of inequality in digital political practices. Empirically, the paper draws on 66 semi-structured expert interviews conducted in 2025 with actors from politics, business, interest groups, and civil society working in the field of gender policies in Germany, Poland, and Spain. Using qualitative content analysis, the paper reconstructs how digital competencies are enacted in everyday organisational behaviour, including decisions about platform presence or avoidance, interaction with users, and the professionalisation or externalisation of social media work. The central empirical contribution is the analysis of organisational responses to hostile digital environments. The findings reveal substantial variation in how actors perceive and manage hate speech, coordinated harassment, and shitstorms. While some actors rely on formalised strategies and guidelines, or specialised communication staff to handle digital attacks, others lack clear procedures, downplay the relevance of these phenomena, or do not perceive a need for preventive strategies as long as they have not yet been directly affected. This indicates that organisational responses to digital hostility are often reactive rather than anticipatory, despite the growing influence of hostile digital practices. These differences are interpreted in the light of second-level digital divide. Actors with higher digital competencies are better equipped to sustain visibility and engagement in digital arenas, whereas others face heightened risks of withdrawal, self-censorship, or disengagement. Further findings show that processes of professionalisation and externalisation such as employing social media managers shape digital engagement as well. Actors with greater resources and strategic capacities can better deal with such negative exposure, but this indicates unequal opportunities to set up organisational resilience. Noteworthy, there are differences across the three countries and actor types, indicating that digital political engagement is shaped by both organisational and structural conditions. By shifting the analytical focus from citizens to organised actors, the paper demonstrates how unequal digital competencies among those who dominate online political communication have downstream consequences for civic inclusion. As organised interests are central producers of political content, inequalities at this level structure the digital information environments citizen’s encounter.