Lena Frischlich

University of Southern Denmark | SDU

The use of online media has been a natural part of everyday life for a while now. More than 60 per cent of the world’s population used the internet in April 2021.1 Via their smartphones, many people are online every day. In a digital society, the permanent access we have to information and the possibility of being constantly connected with others l...

In order to better understand alternative news media, we need to focus more centrally on the audiences that regularly consume them. This special issue, entitled “Contesting the Mainstream: Understanding Alternative News Media,” advances such an audience turn. In the introduction, we outline how scholars have understood and characterized alternative...

An emotion that has recently gained traction in the context of populism is nostalgia, a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past. Nostalgia can refer to the past of one’s group or nation, as reflected in populists’ narratives of the heartland—the vision of a utopian future based on an idealized past in which their country belonged to t...

Online fake news can have noxious consequences. Social media platforms are experimenting with different interventions to curb fake news' spread, often employing them simultaneously. However, research investigating the interaction of these interventions is limited. Here, we use the heuristic‐systematic model of information processing (HSM) as a theo...

Social media platforms, such as Instagram, are regularly misused for spreading covert (Islamic) extremist propaganda. Affect and emotion are central tools used in extremist propaganda, but there is little research into the combined employment of different social media elements, such as hashtags, visuals, and texts, in the context of propaganda. Thi...

In this introduction to the special issue Contesting the Mainstream: Understanding Alternative News Media and its Contribution to Diversity, we discuss how and to what extent alternative news media contribute to news diversity. We elaborate on the concept of diversity, the democratic role of media and the normative implications of the position of a...

Extremismus und Terrorismus sind weltweit relevante Bedrohungen für das friedliche Zusammenleben. Extremismusprävention versucht, Radikalisierungsprozesse in diese Richtung und damit letztlich Extremismus und Terrorismus zu verhindern. Dieses Kapitel gibt einen Überblick über die Extremismusprävention. Ausgehend von einem prozessualen Verständnis v...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by a massive flood of “fake news”, conspiracy theories, and distorted information more generally. Alternative news media have been accused of contributing to this pollution the information sphere. In this article, we argue that audiences with a counter-hegemonic, ideologically biased worldview a...

Das Kapitel klärt über ethische Herausforderungen in der Terrorismusforschung –konkreter im Verlauf des Forschungsprozesses – auf. Insbesondere wird auf das hohe Sicherheitsinteresse an der Terrorismusforschung und das besondere Sicherheitsrisiko für Forschende und Beforschte als spezifische ethische Herausforderungen eingegangen. Zudem werden weit...

Conspiracy theories on social media have been suspected of contributing to mobilization and radicalization. Yet, few studies have examined the prevalence of psychological variables that may serve to motivate normative and non-normative collective action in this material. Drawing from the “social identity model of collective action,” the current stu...

Hate Speech ist im Alltag junger Menschen zunehmend präsent. Der Beitrag liefert aus kommunikationswissenschaftlicher Perspektive (1) Einblicke in die verschiedenen Formen von Hate Speech. Zudem werden (2) die individuellen und gesellschaftlichen Folgen von Hate Speech thematisiert und (3) Ansatzpunktefu¨r den (präventiven) Umgang, z.B. innerhalb d...

Extremist:innen greifen zunehmend auf dunkle Sozialen Medien zurück. Der Begriff der dunklen sozialen Medien umfasst verschiedene Typen alternativer Sozialer Medien (soziale Kontermedien wie Gab, kontextgebundene alternative Soziale Medien wie VKontakte, Fringe Communities wie 4Chan), ebenso wie verschiedene Typen dunkler Kanäle (ursprünglich priva...

Dark social media has been described as a home base for extremists and a breeding ground for dark participation. Beyond the description of single cases, it often remains unclear what exactly is meant by dark social media and which opportunity structures for extremism emerge on these applications. The current paper contributes to filling this gap. W...

Terrorism is first and foremost viewed as a matter of security policy; however, its emergence, perception, effects, prevention and mitigation actually involve a multitude of societal sectors as well as academic fields, which also means that numerous academics, practitioners and decision-makers are in a position to contribute to analysing and counte...

In recent years, there have been increasing global concerns about the abuse of digital technologies for malicious “dark participation,” the spreading of digital offenses, hate speech, fake news, and conspiracy theories. Clearly, dark participation can have severe effects on the victims and on society at large. However, less is known about the impac...

At least since 2016, distorted news published in populist alternative media outlets have raised global concerns about the effects of distorted news on democratic process such as opinion formation and voting. Not all individuals are equally susceptible to distorted news. In three experimental studies (total N = 1,024), we demon-strate that (a) d...

Fake news spreading virally on social media platforms is a topic of high societal and political relevance. Therefore, platforms have been experimenting with different measures of intervention. However, research on their effectiveness is still limited and dispositional factors are often neglected. We tested two promising interventions – adding warni...

Online comments and contributions from users are not always constructive nor rational. This also applies to content that is directed at journalists or published on journalistic platforms. So-called ‘dark participation’ in online communication is a challenge that journalists have to face because it lowers users’ perceived credibility of media brands...

This editorial introduces the thematic issue on inspirational media; including its role in the elicitation of meaning and self-transcendence, audience responses to inspirational narratives, and the potential for inspirational media to be used for manipulative purposes. We first set the stage for the thematic issue by describing an organizing framew...

Menschen sind soziale Wesen. Das aufgrund der gesundheitlichen Gefährdungssituation durch das neuartige Coronavirus geltende Gebot der sozialen Distanzierung (social distancing), die nachdrückliche Aufforderung zuhause zu bleiben (stay at home) sowie die in vielen Ländern erlassenen Regelungen zu Kontaktverboten und Ausgangssperren stellen daher ei...

This policy paper focuses on the nexus between trust and mis- and disinformation in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we use the image of a spiral to illustrate selected predictors of distrust at the macro-level of societal institutions (particularly democratic institutions and the media), the meso-level of intergroup relations, and the...

This policy paper focuses on the nexus between trust and mis- and disinformation in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we use the image of a spiral to illustrate selected predictors of distrust at the macro-level of societal institutions (particularly democratic institutions and the media), the meso-level of intergroup relations, and the...

In recent times, distorted information has frequently been discussed as a serious problem for democracies. There are concerns that such information spreading via social media may lead to severe effects, such as a decline in social cohesion. Apart from platforms and journal-istic organizations, users play a decisive role in preventing the spread of...

Online media offer unprecedented access to digital public spheres, largely enhancing users' opportunities for participation and providing new means for strengthening democratic discourse. At the same time, the last decades have demonstrated that online discourses are often characterised by so-called 'dark participation' the spreading of lies and in...

Comments in designated sections of newspaper websites and on social media platforms are the most prominent form of user participation in journalism, offering the opportunity to connect to the audience. Yet, rising levels of dark participation in the form of hate speech, disinformation, and strategic attempts to influence public opinion, provide new...

Online-Medien sind auch in Deutschland längst selbstverständlicher Teil des Alltags geworden. Die meisten Menschen nutzen das Internet, viele sind über das eigene Smartphone täglich online. Der quasi permanente Zugang zu Informationen und die Möglichkeit, ständig mit anderen verbunden zu sein, führen zu einem fundamentalen Wandel menschlichen Erleb...

Recently, social bots, (semi-) automatized accounts in social media, gained global attention in the context of public opinion manipulation. Dystopian scenarios like the malicious amplification of topics, the spreading of disinformation, and the manipulation of elections through “opinion machines” created headlines around the globe. As a consequence...

The unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic has been an unprecedented challenge for news media around the globe. While journalism is meant to process yet unknown events by design, the dynamically evolving situation affected all aspects of life in such profound ways that even the routines of crisis reporting seemed to be insufficient. Critics noted tende...

The outbreak of the new coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that hit the world in 2020 led not only to a global pandemic with thousands of deaths around the globe but also to a globald spread of conspiracy theories and medical falsehoods, a dangerous 'infodemic' as the World-Health Organization labelled it. Mass media reports and initial studies suspect...

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only had severe political, economic, and societal effects, it has also affected media and communication systems in unprecedented ways. While traditional journalistic media has tried to adapt to the rapidly evolving situation, alternative news media on the Internet have given the events their own ideological spin. Such...

The COVID-19 pandemic has not only had severe political, economic, and societal effects, it has also affected media and communication systems in unprecedented ways. While traditional journalistic media has tried to adapt to the rapidly evolving situation, alternative news media on the Internet have given the events their own ideological spin. Such...

Mit Counter-Narrativen wird in der Extremismusprävention die Intention verbunden, Mediennutzer*innen (auch) in digitalen Welten attraktive „Gegengeschichten“ zu extremistischen Weltbildern zur Verfügung zu stellen. In diesem Kapitel werden Counter-Narrative und die mit ihnen verbundenen Intentionen eingehender beschrieben. Praxisnah wird auf Beding...

The current paper documents the results of a multi-disciplinary international workshop on ethics in (de-)radicalization research, organized by the authors at the Bochum Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in March 2019. In light of the specificity of each research context, this paper aims to develop a baseline for ethical standards across p...

In addition to the increased opportunities for citizens to participate in society, participative online journalistic platforms offer opportunities for the dissemination of online propaganda through fake accounts and social bots. Community managers are expected to separate real expressions of opinion from manipulated statements through fake accounts...

Social bots have recently gained attention in the context of public opinion manipulation on social media platforms. While a lot of research effort has been put into the classification and detection of such automated programs, it is still unclear how technically sophisticated those bots are, which platforms they target, and where they originate from...

In online media environments, nostalgia can be used as important ingredient of propaganda strategies, specifically, by creating societal pessimism. This work addresses the automated detection of nostalgic text as a first step towards automatically identifying nostalgia-based manipulation strategies. We compare the performance of standard machine le...

Alternative news media with a right-wing populist leaning are flourishing. They pitch themselves as opposition to a hegemonically interpreted mainstream news media system. Yet, at the same time, they rely on the so criticized others to justify their own existence. Using a co-orientation framework, the current study asked in how far right-wing popul...

Since the Brexit vote and the 2016 U.S. election, much has been speculated about the use of so-called social bots, (semi-)automatized pseudo-users in online media, as political manipulation tools. Accumulating global evidence shows that pseudo-users are used for different purposes, such as the amplification of political topics or the simulation of...

Eudaimonic entertainment, which motivates a reflection on topics such as virtue or meaning, has many benefits, such as fostering wellbeing and inspiring prosocial behavior. Yet, it may also have a darker side when Islamic extremists use accordant elements in online propaganda. So far, this “dark inspiration” has attracted little scholarly interest....

The digitization of the world has also led to a digitization of communication processes. Traditional research methods fall short in understanding communication in digital worlds as the scope has become too large in volume, variety, and velocity to be studied using traditional approaches. In this paper, we present computational methods and their use...

Keynote about new challenges for (future) journalists working in shared media spaces.

Since the Brexit vote and the US election 2016, much has been speculated about the use of so-called social bots, semi-automatized pseudo-users in online media, as political manipulation tools. Accumulating global evidence shows that pseudo-users are used for different purposes such as the amplifica-tion of political topics or the simulation of larg...

Alternative news media with a right-wing populist leaning are flourishing. They pitch themselves as opposition to a hegemonically interpreted mainstream news media system. Yet, at the same time, they rely on the so criticized others to justify their own existence. Using a co-orientation framework, the current study asked in how far right-wing popul...

Avatars are our digital embodied alter egos. Virtual embodiment by avatars allows social interaction with others using the full spectrum of verbal and non-verbal behaviour. Still, one's avatar appearances is elective. Hence, avatars make it possible for users to discuss and exchange sensible or even problematic personal topics potentially hiding th...

Terror management theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1986) posits that individuals defend against death-anxieties by striving for (symbolic) immortality. Immortality is promised by a symbolic anxiety buffer, which entails one’s (a) cultural worldview; (b) self-esteem; and (c) intimate relationships. Under conditions of mortality salience (M...

Irrespective of the numerous possibilities for avatar selection and customization, research claimed that White avatars compared to avatars from other ethnicitiesare overrepresented in online environments. The present experiment investigated how existential threats, namely the awareness of one’s own mortality (mortality salience, MS) affects the pre...

Sogenannte Counter Narratives ("Gegenerzählungen") sollen extremistischer Propaganda im Netz entgegentreten, zum Beispiel in Form von Videos – über diesen Ansatz der Prävention wird viel diskutiert. Studien belegen, dass Erzählungen eine große Überzeugungskraft besitzen, so Lena Frischlich. Doch als einfaches "Gegengift" funktionieren sie nicht. Tr...

This article proposes a definition of alternative news media and suggests routes for further research. It complements and extends previous conceptualizations in research on alternative media and outlines an umbrella definition of this phenomenon aimed to inspire contemporary research and scholarly debate. Previous research has been guided by a ‘pro...

Beitrag für das Dossier Digitale Dessinformation der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung. Abrufbar unter: https://www.bpb.de/gesellschaft/digitales/digitale-desinformation/290527/kritische-medienkompetenz. Um Falschmeldungen zu begegnen, bedarf es seitens der Nutzer mehr kritischer Medienkompetenz. Theoretische Kenntnisse reichen dabei nicht, son...

“Fake news” is an expression that became popularized during the 2016 U.S. election. The rather inflationary use of the term since then has changed its meaning, making it an ambiguous and difficult concept. The term is currently used both as (a) a derogatory term denouncing media and journalism; and (b) an umbrella term for various forms of wrong, m...

Right-wing extremists and Islamist extremists try to recruit new followers by addressing their national (for instance, German) or religious (Muslim) social identity via online propaganda videos. Two studies examined whether capitalizing on a shared group-membership affects the emotional and cognitive response towards extremist propaganda. In both s...

Social bots have recently gained attention in the context of public opinion manipulation on social media platforms. While a lot of research effort has been put into the classification and detection of such (semi-)automated programs, it is still unclear how sophisticated those bots actually are, which platforms they target, and where they originate...

User comments, as the most prominent form of participation in online-journalism, offer multiple options for so-called dark participation, comments that transgress norms of politeness or honesty with partially sinister motives. Strategic forms of dark participation such as political trolling in user comments have both raised attention and global con...

Mit der quasi allgegenwärtigen Präsenz des (mobilen) Internets geht zum einen ein großes demokratisches Potential einher: Ganz nach Habermas' Theorie der deliberativen Demokratie können sich Bürger_innen online frei über relevante Themen informieren und in einen Diskurs eintreten, der zu einem gemeinsamen Konsens führt. Auf der dunklen Seite der di...

The Internet creates a space in which hate, negativity and the derogation of certain individuals or social groups (e.g., homosexuals, migrants, or women) can be found in various facets-be it in hateful comments of single users under journalistic online articles or below YouTube videos, propagandistic messages of extremists, or populist speech of po...

The perceived threat of extremist online propaganda has generated a need for countermeasures applicable to large audiences. The dissemination of videos designed to counter violent extremism (CVE videos) is widely discussed. These videos are often described as “counter-narratives,” implying that narrativity is a crucial factor for their effectivenes...

Participatory formats in online journalism offer increased options for user comments to reach a mass audience, also enabling the spreading of incivility. As a result, journalists feel the need to moderate offensive user comments in order to prevent the derailment of discussion threads. However, little is known about the principles on which forum mo...

Previous research reported that meaningful entertainment experiences are associated with elevation, mixed affect, physical indicators, and moral motivations. The importance of values, particularly altruistic values and self-transcendence, was thought to play a central role. Although the importance of values has been found to vary across cultures, l...

Online-Propaganda ist in aller Munde. Längst wird nicht mehr nur extremistischen Gruppierungen oder autoritären Staaten vorgeworfen Propaganda-Kampagnen im Netz zu steuern oder soziale Medien mit Propaganda-Materialien zu füllen. Aus Sicht der Propagandist*innen soll Online-Propaganda verschiedene Zielgrößen beeinflussen: Das gesamtgesellschaftlich...

False Information - Real Problems? Political anger, ineffecacy, trust and populist votes. High-Density Poster presenting data from a large random-quota study in Germany addressing (a) the association between the self-reported exposure to distorted information and the usage of alternative online news, feelings of political anger and appraisals of p...

“Fake News” is an expression that became popularized during the 2016 US election. The rather inflationary use of the term since then has changed its meaning, making it an ambig-uous and difficult concept. The term is currently used both as (a) a derogatory term de-nouncing media and journalism; and (b) an umbrella-term for various forms of wrong, m...

Presentation of the junior research group DemoRESILdigital at the DGPUK in Mannheim

Fake News und Social Bots sind in aller Munde. Staatliche und zivilgesellschaftliche Akteure befürchten, dass „computerisierte Propaganda“ in Form von „falschen Nachrichten“ (Fake News) oder „Sozialen Robotern“ (Social Bots) zu einer Ungleichverteilung von Informationen in der Gesellschaft, einer Verrohung der Diskussion im Netz oder gar zu einer G...

beschäftigt sich mit verdeckt und automatisiert betriebener Online-Propaganda, Extremismus, Hass und Mobbing in Online-Medien. Dabei stehen einerseits die technischen Möglichkeiten zur Nutzung von Fake-Profilen und Social Bots zur strategischen Manipulation im Fokus. Andererseits werden die zentralen kommunikativen und psychologischen Mechanismen z...

Der Begriff »Fake News«, zu Deutsch »falsche Nachrichten«, wird derzeit von Akteur*innen auf allen Seiten des politischen Spektrums genutzt. Die einen werfen damit den etablierten Medien vor, nicht objektiv zu berichten, die anderen beschreiben damit den Einzug von politischer Propaganda in den medialen Alltag. Zu politischen Zwecken lancierte Nach...

Die Debatte um die Wirkung von Videos gegen die Verbreitung extremistischer Ideologien im Netz wird erbittert geführt. Die Diskussionen drehen sich um die angenommene (Un-)Wirksamkeit von Videos gegen Extremismus, die (Un-)Sinnigkeit der häufig verwendeten Bezeichnung "Counter-Narrative", zu Deutsch "Gegen-Geschichten", sowie um die Frage, wie sol...

“Counter-narratives” shall serve as “antidote” against extremist propaganda online. Drawing upon narrative persuasion we present two experiments testing the effects of narrativity in propaganda and counter-videos on persuasive processing and attraction towards the groups behind the videos.

Research has shown that existential anxieties motivate symbolic defenses. One symbolic defense is the increased preference for those who validate one’s worldview, for instance by sharing one’s attitudes or one’s cultural background, as compared to those who fail to do so. Although attitudinal and cultural similarities are rarely independent in ever...

The Internet offers multiple options for the dissemination of hidden propaganda and hate messages, ranging from cloaked websites, over Twitter bots to fabricated forum posts. The latter poses severe problems for journalists and community managers: They need to detect hidden propaganda and disentangle valid opinions from manipulated statements – wit...

Extremistische Propaganda ist im Netz, z. B. in Form von YouTube Videos, weitverbreitet. Viele befürchten, dass sie bislang neutrale Zuschauerinnen und Zuschauer beeinflussen könnte. Aber ist das tatsächlich so? Und wie sollen sogenannte Counter Narrative, also Videos oder Kommentare, die sich den „extremistischen Geschichten“ entgegenstellen, ein...