Social media as the fifth estate
Strategic organisation of German and Finnish counterspeech campaigns on Facebook
Keywords:
counterspeech, social media, fifth estate, strategic organisation of activitiesAbstract
Social media are also called the fifth estate that form a new control body and may thus fulfil democratic functions. On the other hand, social media have enabled the proliferation of hateful debates in which, with reference to freedom of speech, previously tabooed contents and language are becoming de-tabooed and accepted. As an answer to fake news, direct and indirect hate speech also forms of organised counterspeech have been developing in social media to counter the normalisation of aggressive and hateful speech. To influence the discourse in comment columns of social media in terms of the fifth estate, counterspeech has to be visible also quantitatively. In this contrastive study, I analyse the activities of the German and Finnish Facebook groups of the network #iamhere international. Special focus is on how the groups organise their activities strategically and in how far the conventionalisation of digital genres influences the intensity and continuity of their activities.
