Abstract
This article sheds light on the role of social media in the instigation of acts of violence. It identifies and interprets the major forms of interaction emerging from the interplay between page owners and users on German right-wing, anti-asylum Facebook pages, bringing to the fore these pages’ interactional dynamic. Mainly two forms of interaction are identified. Firstly, by condensing news reports about crimes committed by foreigners into a coherent vision of reality, users are to be awakened to this reality. Secondly, by incessantly pointing to the intolerableness of this reality, the users’ continued inactivity is turned into a moral issue that goes to the core of their identities.
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- 1.
Other names in frequent use now are Widerstand (‘resistance’) + [name of the region/town/city], for example ‘Widerstand Berlin,’ or [name of the region/town/city] wehrt sich (‘fights back’), for example ‘Parchim wehrt sich’ (see also Giesler 2016).
- 2.
If not indicated otherwise, all translations from German to English are mine.
- 3.
Of 5000 questionnaires sent out, 2420 were answered and returned, which amounts to a response rate of 49.9 percent. (Decker et al. 2016b, p. 26)
- 4.
Whereas most pages claim to be independent from party politics (see Giesler 2016), party affinities of Nein zum Heim pages can easily be identified from the main posts and the users’ comments in response to them. These affinities range from extreme-right positions compatible with the National Party of Germany (NPD), to the more moderate right-wing AfD. A post on ‘Nein zum Heim in Köpenick,’ published the day before the county elections in Berlin and Brandenburg, captures the relation between the two parties well: ‘Squares vote AfD, real men NPD,’ reads the banner, signed by the Young Nationalists (JN). Arguably, this reveals the ideological range of page administrators and users and the dramatis personae on the ‘Nein zum Heim’ pages.
- 5.
For example: ‘I am afraid for my children!!!! Now is the time to wake up!’ (‘Nein zum Heim in Guben,’ 6 January 2016); ‘Now some of our citizens seem to wake up, common sense is setting in’ (‘Nein zum Heim in Schwarzwald-Beer-Heuberg,’ 30 January 2016); ‘When does this damn state finally wake up and see that we are on the brink of disaster?’ (‘Nein zum Heim in Oranienburg,’ 25 August 2016).
- 6.
Against a view of human existence as defined by what the political anthropologist Helmut Plessner (1982) calls ‘eccentric positionality,’ that is a mode of existence that is reflexive in that a person does not only experience life, but also experiences his/her own experience (Plessner 1982, p. 10), we cannot ever conceive of symbolic acts as directly triggering acts of violence. After all, the assumption of such a direct cause-and-effect chain must fall short of the reflexive mode of experiencing that defines us as human. However, with the help of psychoanalytic theories it is possible, for example, to approach an understanding of the powers that impede and inhibit this kind of reflection or that lead it to take on and accept (psycho-)logics that justify and redeem a departure from symbolic means of contention. It is that which I will do in this article.
- 7.
- 8.
All numbers relating to the Facebook pages presented in this chapter are from autumn 2016 and might have been subject to changes over time.
- 9.
The number of ‘likes’ ranged from below 10 to above 1000; ‘shares’ from zero to into the hundreds; and the number of comments ranged from zero to up into the forties.
- 10.
On the Guben page, for example, the balance of comments from users with male and female names is 10 to two (i.e. 80 percent of comments come from male users, 20 percent from female users). On the Köpenick page, it is 10 to three (i.e. 70 percent to 30 percent). This seems characteristic for all pages looked into. With their defensive posture, they seem to be generally understood as male domains.
- 11.
Indeed, submitting the analysed posts on the Köpenick page to a word list check shows that the word ‘info’ is the second most used noun on the page after ‘Berlin,’ with the phrase Zur Info being used 74 times (out of 330 instances of ‘info’).
- 12.
In terms of frequency of usage on the Guben page, the word Einzelfall and the plural form Einzelfälle together (53 mentions in posts during the analysed time) put the word on a par with Flüchtlinge (‘refugees,’ 58 mentions) and Volk (‘people,’ 53 mentions).
- 13.
That is, exactly those sources discredited by the page owners as well as other right-wing publications belonging to the ‘lying press,’ a term originally coined during the Nazi reign in Germany (1933–1945) and made popular again by the PEGIDA movement.
- 14.
‘Nein zum Heim in Schwarzwald-Beer-Heuberg,’ for example, shares three items from bz-berlin.de, two from ruhraktuell.com, one from niederlausitz-aktuell.de, two from wochenblick.at, nine items from krone.at, and so on.
- 15.
This conception of condensation is related to Freud’s use of the term. Freud conceived of condensation as a central dream mechanism, and ‘one of the central modes of the functioning of the unconscious processes: a sole idea represents several associative chains at whose point of intersection it is located’ (see discussion of ‘condensation’ in Laplanche and Pontalis 1973).
- 16.
With 42 mentions, ‘evening walk’ (Abendspaziergang) is the second most used noun on the page, after ‘Oranienburg’ (59 mentions) and before ‘Brandenburg’ (39 mentions).
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Krüger, S. (2018). Violence and the Virtual: Right-wing, Anti-asylum Facebook Pages and the Fomenting of Political Violence. In: Krüger, S., Figlio, K., Richards, B. (eds) Fomenting Political Violence. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97505-4_5
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