The Rise of Germany's AfD: A Social Media Analysis
Open accessAbstract
In 2017, a far-right party entered the German parliament for the first time in over half a century. The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) became the third largest party in the government. Its campaign focused on Euroscepticism and a nativist stance against immigration. The AfD used all available social media channels to spread this message. This paper seeks to understand the AfD's social media strategy over the last years on the full gamut of social media platforms and to verify the effectiveness of the party's online messaging strategy. For this purpose, we collected data related to Germany's main political parties from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. This data was subjected to a unified multi-platform analysis, which relies on four measures: party engagement, user engagement, message spread, and acceptance. This analysis proves the AfD's superior online popularity relative to the rest of Germany's political parties. The evidence also indicates that automated accounts contributed to this online superiority. Finally, we demonstrate that as part of its social media strategy, the AfD avoided discussion of its economic proposals and instead focused on pushing its anti-immigration agenda to gain popularity.
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Digital platforms were observed to benefit populist parties more than they benefit established politicians.
“For example, digital platforms were observed to benefit populist parties more than they benefit established politicians131–134.”
From A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy (2022) · cites this paper as [132]
Descriptive evidence on the relative activity and popularity of right-wing populist parties in Europe suggests their over-representation, as in the case of Germany's AfD, on social media, relative to established democratic parties.
“Furthermore, results about populism might be skewed: descriptive evidence on the relative activity and popularity of right-wing populist parties in Europe suggests their over-representation, as in the case of Germany’s AfD, on social media, relative to established democratic parties (see, for example, ref. 132).”
From A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy (2022) · cites this paper as [132]
Cites
Unpacking the Social Media Bot: A Typology to Guide Research and Policy
Gorwa, R., & Guilbeault, D. (2020) · Policy & Internet · doi:10.1002/poi3.184 · Cited by 270 · see citing works
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A systematic review of worldwide causal and correlational evidence on digital media and democracy
Lorenz-Spreen, P., Oswald, L., Lewandowsky, S., & Hertwig, R. (2022) · Nature Human Behaviour · doi:10.1038/s41562-022-01460-1 · Cited by 348 · see citing works
- Authors
- Serrano, J. C. M., Shahrezaye, M., Papakyriakopoulos, O., & Hegelich, S.
- Affiliations
- Bavarian School of Public Policy, Munich, Bavaria
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2019-07-19
- Pages
- 214-223
- OpenAlex
- W2955312057
- Cited by
- 62
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 7 · 2025: 12 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 1
- FWCI
- 23.70
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- International Conference on Social Media and Society (SMSociety) (publishedVersion)
- mediaTUM (Technical University of Munich) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Populism, Right-Wing Movements
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Misinformation and Its Impacts
- Keywords
- Alternative für Deutschland, far-right parties, social media strategy, political parties, Euroscepticism, anti-immigration, nativism, online engagement, automated accounts, political communication, Germany
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