Mimicking News: How the credibility of an established tabloid is used when disseminating racism

Abstract

This article explores the mimicking of tabloid news as a form of covert racism, relying on the credibility of an established tabloid newspaper. The qualitative case study focuses on a digital platform for letters to the editor, operated without editorial curation pre-publication from 2010 to 2018 by one of Denmark’s largest newspapers, Ekstra Bladet . A discourse analysis of the 50 most shared letters to the editor on Facebook shows that nativist, far-right actors used the platform to disseminate fear-mongering discourses and xenophobic conspiracy theories, disguised as professional news and referred to as articles. These processes took place at the borderline of true and false as well as racist and civil discourse. At this borderline, a lack of supervision and moderation coupled with the openness and visual design of the platform facilitated new forms of covert racism between journalism and user-generated content.

Full text

1
Farkas, J., & Neumayer, C. (2020). Mimicking news: How the credibility of an established tab-
loid is used when disseminating racism. Nordicom Review, 41(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.2478/
nor-2020-0001
NORDICOM REVIEW
Mimicking News
How the credibility of an established tabloid
is used when disseminating racism
Johan FarkasI & Christina NeumayerII
I School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University, Sweden
II Digital Design Department, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
This article explores the mimicking of tabloid news as a form of covert racism, relying on
the credibility of an established tabloid newspaper. The qualitative case study focuses on a
digital platform for letters to the editor, operated without editorial curation pre-publication
from 2010 to 2018 by one of Denmark’s largest newspapers, Ekstra Bladet. A discourse
analysis of the 50 most shared letters to the editor on Facebook shows that nativist, far-
right actors used the platform to disseminate fear-mongering discourses and xenophobic
conspiracy theories, disguised as professional news and referred to as articles. These pro-
cesses took place at the borderline of true and false as well as racist and civil discourse.
At this borderline, a lack of supervision and moderation coupled with the openness and
visual design of the platform facilitated new forms of covert racism between journalism
and user-generated content.
Keywords: racism, letters to the editor, borderline discourse, digital journalism, fake news
Introduction
Publish your own text on the biggest news website. The People’s Voice is for
people who are passionate about a cause – and want to say their piece.
(Ekstra Bladet, 2016)1
This quote was placed on the front page of The People’s Voice [Folkets Røst], an online
platform operated by the Danish tabloid newspaper Ekstra Bladet from 2010 to 2018.
While active, users were encouraged to “get involved in the debate, make your opinion
known” (Ekstra Bladet, 2016) without editorial supervision or curation pre-publication.
Ekstra Bladet’s editor-in-chief, Poul Madsen, described the platform as an open space
for discussion, in which users could write anything they wanted (Andreassen, 2015).
The newspaper consistently referred to content on The People’s Voice as “letters to
the editor” (Andreassen, 2015), insisting that it represented the digital equivalent of
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

2
Johan Farkas & Christina Neumayer
opinion pages in print media (Madsen, 2016). Yet, authors on The People’s Voice often
described their work as news articles, suggesting a hybrid format between news and
opinion. Several of the most active authors on The People’s Voice were also prolic
contributors to hyperpartisan right-wing news platforms. This suggests the appropriation
of The People’s Voice as an extension of hyperpartisan news platforms and nativist blogs.
Critical research has shown how racism is increasingly present and even amplied
in digital media environments (Daniels, 2013; Matamoros-Fernández, 2017). The ideal
of enabling as much freedom of expression as possible has led to a plethora of new
outlets, giving rise to new forms of deception that blur traditional boundaries between
journalism and opinion (Tandoc et al., 2018). While studies of fake news, junk news,
and hyperpartisan media discuss the changing role of gatekeepers, from journalists
to social media platforms (Bro & Wallberg, 2014; Heft et al., 2019; Tandoc et al.,
2018), studies of digital racism focus on tactics of oppression within changing media
environments (Daniels, 2013; Matamoros-Fernández, 2017; Farkas et al., 2018). The
present article combines these lines of research, analysing the discursive tactics of
nativist far-right actors at the juncture of digital journalistic formats and covert racism.
We explore how The People’s Voice was tactically appropriated to legitimise racist
discourse supported by the infrastructure of a tabloid newspaper. In the following, we
introduce the conceptual foundations of the case study, drawing on scholarship about
the blurring boundaries of online journalism and digital racism. We then outline the
study’s qualitative approach drawing on discourse theory, followed by the analysis of
letters published on The People’s Voice, which is structured along the technological
context, sources, and stories.
Journalism, clicks, and social media
In today’s hybrid media systems (Chadwick, 2013), the boundaries between journalism
and user-generated content, old and new media, media institutions and social media, and
credible and dubious information, have become increasingly uid (Tandoc et al., 2018).
Multiple actors participate in the production and dissemination of both professional
journalistic work and user-generated content presented in similar packaging. As noted by
Carlson, “struggles over journalism are often struggles over boundaries” (2015: 2). While
journalistic boundaries have never been entirely static, the digital era introduces new
struggles over what counts as news (Carlson & Lewis, 2015). Recent studies indicate that
online users have diculties assessing information credibility and sources (Garrett et al.,
2019; Nygren & Guath, 2019). In part, this is due to social media’s visual design, making
dierent types of content “often visually indistinguishable” (Vaidhyanathan, 2018: 5).
The rise of digital platforms challenges journalistic authority on several levels, as
these spaces “alter the availability of news, its economic structures, and the relationship
between journalists and their audience” (Carlson, 2017: 2). Newspapers increasingly
rely on online user engagement as measures of proliferation (Richardson & Stanyer,
2011). While journalists still act as gatekepepers of newsworthiness, the premises on
which decisions are made have, to some extent, changed (Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2016).
As Lee and Chyi (2014) argue, online newsworthiness is dened by a greater variety
of factors than in print media. This gives rise to new hybrid modalities of gatekeeping
and news (Eg & Krumsvik, 2019).
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

3
Mimicking News
One important aspect of online news proliferation is the “clickability” of headlines,
or their ability to attract attention and cause users to distribute it further by clicking,
liking, commenting, and sharing (Karlsson & Clerwall, 2013; Kuiken et al., 2017).
Clickbait articles are often simplied, speculative, negative, and provocative (Blom
& Hansen, 2015), using questions and surprising statistics to attract attention (Kuiken
et al., 2017). In a broader context, scholars argue that this amplies existing “erosion
of the fact/commentary distinction” (McNair, 2017: 1327). Fake news, junk news, and
hyperpartisan media often rely on clickbait headlines to attract attention (Bradshaw
et al., 2019). While such content can spread in social media and outside the reach of
established media institutions (Bradshaw et al., 2019; Heft et al., 2019; Howard et al.,
2017), professional news media can amplify and legitimise harmful digital content by
increasing its visibility and reach (Phillips, 2018).
Deceptive news and its connection to racism
The loss of accuracy in favour of clickability in digital media has been identied as a key
factor in the rise of what has been dened as fake news, junk news, and hyperpartisan
media (Carlson, 2017).2 As argued by Tandoc and colleagues, fake news appropriates
the credibility of news media, undermining journalistic credibility by mimicking “the
look and feel of real news; from how websites look; to how articles are written; to how
photos include attributions” (2018: 147). They argue that fake news is in many respects
co-constructed by the audience who mistakes it for credible news and legitimises it
through online engagement. Over the past decades, research has increasingly shown
how deceptive tactics are mobilised to promote racism in digital media environments
(Daniels, 2013; Matamoros-Fernández, 2017; Farkas et al., 2018).
In this context, Matamoros-Fernández (2017: 930) introduces the notion of “platformed
racism” to encompass the amplication of racist discourses on digital platforms at the
intersection of user practices, algorithms, interfaces, policies, and business models.
Digital media platforms are in many respects ambiguous spaces of expression, blurring
the boundaries between what is considered inappropriate, fake, trolling, and normal
(Phillips, 2018; Phillips & Milner, 2017). Krzyżanowski and Ledin (2017: 567) present
the notion of “borderline discourse” to encompass the ways in which racist ideas can
become legitimised online by being packaged as civil and acceptable. This packaging
occurs through the tactical appropriation of institutional authority, for example by
exploiting existing platforms or mimicking established formats, such as journalistic
genres. Borderline discourse can proliferate both on fringe websites and established
platforms hosted by credible institutions, where uncivil ideas are promoted under the guise
of civility. Here, racist actors take a “self-proclaimed role as interlocutors of the accepted
sites of debating political views” (Krzyżanowski & Ledin, 2017: 570). Borderline
discourses normalise otherwise uncivil ideas and bring them from fringe positions into
mainstream media and parliamentary politics. This is linked to populist rhetoric revolv-
ing around the discursive construction of “us” versus “them” and “the people” versus
the “foreign Other”. As noted by Engesser and colleagues, “populist communication
logic and online opportunities go hand in hand” (2017: 1284).
This research departed from this intersection of racism, deception, ambivalence, and
online news. Following Giglietto and colleagues (2019), we approached the case study
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

4
Johan Farkas & Christina Neumayer
from a processual perspective, focusing equally on the studied sources (their author-
ity and proximity), the stories (and their alignment with the specic values), and the
technological context (the platform infrastructure and visual presentation). We argue
that the normalisation of digital racism takes place at the borderline of true and false as
well as civil and uncivil discourse. Within this conceptual framework, we explore how
The People’s Voice was tactically appropriated to amplify racism through borderline
discourse (Krzyżanowski & Ledin, 2017) and how it blurred the boundaries of journal-
ism and opinion (Carlson & Lewis, 2015).
The People’s Voice
The Danish tabloid newspaper Ekstra Bladet, founded in 1904, operates the second-most
visited Danish website, surpassed only by the national public service broadcaster, Dan-
marks Radio (Alexa, 2018). Launched in 1997 (Sahl, 2017), Ekstra Bladet’s website has
continuously ranked as one of the most visited in Denmark (Danske Medier Research,
2018). With the emergence of social media, the newspaper increasingly relies on online
distribution, especially through Facebook, with 72 per cent of the Danish population hav-
ing a Facebook account (Rossi et al., 2016). Ekstra Bladet is known for its combination
of entertainment and investigative journalism for which it has received several journal-
istic awards (Dansk Journalistforbund, 2018). Following international developments in
news digitisation (Carlson, 2017), the newspaper has in recent years adapted to digital
media by enabling native advertising (Barlag, 2016) and producing clickbait headlines
to increase user attention and engagement on social media. Ekstra Bladet also runs one
of the largest online discussion forums in Denmark, The Nation [Nationen], which has
been criticised for its hostile tone and racist sentiments (Kjeldtoft, 2016).
The People’s Voice was a digital platform, operated by Ekstra Bladet from 2010 to
2018, where users could publish their own letters to the editor. The platform received
an award for “Best User Involvement” by the Association of Danish Interactive Media
in 2010 (Mediearbejdsgiverne, 2010). Ocially, The People’s Voice never progressed
beyond beta mode, being perpetually labelled as an unnished product (Ekstra Bladet,
2016). In late March 2018, Ekstra Bladet decided to discontinue The People’s Voice,
stating that this was due to insucient user activity and readership (correspondence
with Ekstra Bladet journalist Thomas Harder, 22 March 2018). Ekstra Bladet has since
deleted all content from The People’s Voice.
Methodological approach
Drawing on discourse theory, this qualitative case study analysed the most visible letters
to the editor published on The People’s Voice. The research examined the construction
and presentation of themes, narratives, and rhetorical strategies taking place within the
blurring boundaries of news and opinion, and journalism and user-generated content
facilitated by Ekstra Bladet. The in-depth analysis of the letters focussed on the strat-
egies and narratives that attracted most attention on the platform and discussed their
implications for journalistic boundaries.
While Ekstra Bladet does not provide access to the most read or shared entries, each
entry published on their website (during the time of data collection in February 2017)
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

5
Mimicking News
contained a share-counter indicative of the number of shares on Facebook (see Figure
1, top right corner). To collect the most shared letters on The People’s Voice from 2015
and 2016, we departed from statistics on social media interactions around Danish news
content (see Bro & Wallberg, 2014; De virale nyheder, 2019),3 which showed the number
of interactions (likes, comments, and shares) of each entry from Danish news outlets
after their rst week of publication. These data were collected via Facebook’s Graph
API and the API tool SharedCount. From the data, we generated a list of the 200 entries
(that received most interactions after a week) and crosschecked them with the share-
counters for each of these entries on Ekstra Bladet’s website. This way, we generated
a list of letters that had received most shares on Facebook over time (excluding entries
that had since been deleted).
To enable in-depth qualitative analysis focussing on discourses and rhetorical strategies,
we narrowed our scope to the 50 most shared letters, which were collected through
screen captures. Subsequently, we created an overview of the letters ranked from most
shared to least shared on Facebook containing their headlines, authorship, and numbers
of shares and interactions (see appendix4). Throughout the analysis, each letter from
The People’s Voice is referenced using the author’s surname, year, and ranked number
(e.g. [1]), indicating its proliferation.
Following Yin (2009), we approached Ekstra Bladet’s The People’s Voice as a
context-dependent case shaped by the interaction of user actions, discourses, and digital
architecture. The 50 letters in our study were analysed in four rounds. First, to get an
overview, we counted and catalogued four key elements: authors; quotes and refer-
ences from public gures and experts; hyperlinks to newspapers, blogs, and websites;
and sources of statistics. Second, with a closer reading of the letters, we identied the
main topics and themes in headlines, texts, and images across the material. Third, we
identied patterns for each of the themes in the letters. Fourth, informed by discourse
theory (Laclau & Moue, 2001), we conducted an in-depth discourse analysis of the
letters. This discourse analysis centred on the ways in which dierent narratives and
identities were constructed relationally within the studied material. We particularly
focused on subject positions (articulated political identities), logics of dierence (ways
in which signiers gain meaning through dierences from other discursive elements),
and logics of equivalence (ways in which signiers are linked to discourse, against a
shared opposition) (see Dahlberg & Phelan, 2011). This qualitative analysis enabled a
detailed presentation of rhetorical and discursive strategies.
Upon completion of the process, we used Google search to query for the title of
each letter to the editor, searching for references to them and re-publications. We also
performed queries on Facebook, searching for the letters shared through public accounts,
particularly by political gures. For further information about The People’s Voice, we
corresponded with Ekstra Bladet journalist (and editor of The Nation) Thomas Harder,
collected newspaper articles about The People’s Voice, and (where possible) followed the
proliferation of letters through shares, comments, and likes on social media. While the
study could not draw conclusions about representability of the letters for The People’s
Voice overall, following the proliferation of the most visible letters enabled a critical
discussion of how this phenomenon contributes to the blurring of journalistic formats,
opening up questions for similar use by other media institutions.
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

6
Johan Farkas & Christina Neumayer
A brief note on signicance
The 50 letters from The People’s Voice that received the most interactions on Facebook
(likes, comments, shares) after a week of proliferation received 124,364 interactions.
The 50 letters in our study, which excludes letters deleted by Ekstra Bladet or authors at
the time of data collection, received 78,834 interactions within the rst week and were
shared 124,303 times on Facebook across time. These are relatively small gures as
compared to Ekstra Bladet’s main website (where the top 50 entries from the same two
years received 1,084,598 interactions within the rst week), which helps explain why
the newspaper chose to discontinue the platform. Still, Ekstra Bladet’s website is one of
the most visited news sites in Denmark. While we do not have comparable numbers for
fringe media and hyperpartisan blogs, The People’s Voice did provide an infrastructure
for promoting perspectives that would not be acceptable in mainstream media.
Studies of interactions on Facebook news pages often dierentiate levels of activity
such as likes, shares, and comments (see e.g., Larsson, 2018). While likes are usually
classied as low-level engagement, they mean something dierent if the entry represents
otherwise unacceptable political perspectives (see Neumayer & Svensson, 2016). The
interactions on Facebook with the analysed letters include the ocial Facebook page
of the Danish People’s Party (the third largest political party at the time), the ocial
page of Pia Kjærsgaard (former leader of the Danish People’s Party), and the ocial
page of Martin Geertsen (member of parliament for The Liberal Party). They shared
the letters leading up to the 2015 national elections in Denmark where immigration and
the so-called refugee crisis were heavily disputed and politised issues. By being shared
by prominent political actors and becoming part of mainstream political campaigns, the
letters played a signicant role in transgressing the boundaries between acceptable and
uncivil discourse, as our analysis revealed.
Technological context: An infrastructure for mimicking news
The infrastructure provided by The People’s Voice made it possible to mimic news
published by Ekstra Bladet. This was mainly due to the resemblance between entries
published on both platforms. The overall layout, fonts, and colours were identical, mak-
ing it dicult to dierentiate between user-generated content (originally published on
The People’s Voice) and the work of professional journalists (originally published on
Ekstra Bladet’s news website). With the layout being identical, a reader would have to
identify the author’s name printed in small font below the headline as not belonging
to a journalist (see Figure 1). Within this infrastructure, The People’s Voice enabled
users to produce their own headline, subheading, body text, and hyperlinks as well as
to upload an accompanying image in a visual layout closely resembling news articles
by Ekstra Bladet’s editorial team. Moreover, Ekstra Bladet did not prohibit users from
calling their work “news” or “articles”. When shared on social media (see Figure 2),
letters to the editor appeared identical to articles published by Ekstra Bladet’s newsroom,
with identical formatting and visual layout. The letters appeared with Ekstra Bladet’s
top-level web domain ekstrabladet.dk, identical to news articles. The only dierence
was a small-print disclaimer: “Publish your own text on the biggest news website. The
People’s Voice is for people who are passionate about a cause – and want to say their
piece” (see Figure 2).
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

7
Mimicking News
Figure 1. Resemblance in visual layout, Ekstra Bladet (top) and The People’s Voice
(bottom)
Figure 2. Resemblance in visual layout for articles shared on Facebook, Ekstra Bladet
(left) and The People’s Voice (right), differences highlighted
Comment: The image from The People’s Voice has been blurred. It derives from a criminal case in the UK (Topping, 2013).
While the technical infrastructure made it possible to mimic news articles, Ekstra Bladet
handled The People’s Voice as an opinion page and encouraged anyone to voice their
opinion through the platform (Andreassen, 2015). As an opinion page, The People’s
Voice functioned without supervision, content moderation, or curation pre-publication.
Ekstra Bladet argued that this lack of interference was key to producing an atmosphere
Comment: Translation of headline: Diplomatic Crisis: Løkke [Prime Minister] to the Turks – stay away
Comment: Translation of headline: Denmark is dissolving – Gangs of immigrants are taking over more and more areas
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

8
Johan Farkas & Christina Neumayer
of free and open debate (Bendtsen, 2016). This was supported by the ideal of a platform
that “took care of itself” (correspondence with Ekstra Bladet journalist Thomas Harder,
19 February 2018). The editorial team referred to the content as “letters to the editor”,
“reader posts”, or simply “posts” (Andreassen, 2015; correspondence with Ekstra Bladet
journalist Thomas Harder, 19 February 2018).
The resemblance between the news articles on Ekstra Bladet and opinion pieces
on The People’s Voice led to criticism on several occasions, as they were clearly mis-
taken as articles written by professional journalists. A letter to the editor was widely
circulated as news from Ekstra Bladet prior to the Danish parliamentary elections in
2015. The letter allegedly “revealed” that the husband of Danish Prime Minister, Helle
Thorning-Schmidt, had committed tax fraud (Andreassen, 2015). Editor-in-chief Poul
Madsen admitted that even he was “very confused” until he realised that the story had
not been published by Ekstra Bladet’s newsroom, but “it’s just arranged so it resembles”
(Andreassen, 2015). The newspaper responded by removing the content, but the visual
layout of The People’s Voice remained the same (Andreassen, 2015). In 2016, a letter
to the editor from The People’s Voice, with the headline “Trend arrived in Denmark:
Immigrants kidnapping Danish girls for sex”, once again sparked criticism (Hemmeth,
2016). Within a week after its publication, the letter received 20,484 interactions on
Facebook. Madsen responded defensively to the criticism, arguing that all news media
encompasses both journalism and opinion, and The People’s Voice “is the users’ own
universe” (Madsen, 2016). The platform was, from his perspective, equivalent to opinion
pages in print media. Despite Ekstra Bladet’s defence, Lars Werge, head of the Danish
Union of Journalists at the time, criticised The People’s Voice, arguing that “when you
see this post on social media, I don’t think you notice it’s not a journalistic article […]
which can ultimately damage journalism’s credibility” (Bendtsen, 2016).
The combination of visual layout of The People’s Voice’s, Ekstra Bladet’s insist-
ence in treating The People’s Voice as an opinion page, and the ability of such to travel
through social media in the guise of news articles written by professional journalists,
created a hybrid news format. This format represented personal opinions of users but
could be fashioned into a journalistic news genre and referred to as such. The technologi-
cal infrastructure was thus not only provided by The People’s Voice but also by Ekstra
Bladet and social media platforms. Combined, they created an infrastructure where let-
ters were shared as newspaper articles and strategically quoted and used to legitimise
and normalise racism through “borderline discourse” (Krzyżanowski & Ledin, 2017:
567), as we will unfold in the following sections.
The source: Tracing authors, media, and hyperlinks
Within the technical infrastructure of The People’s Voice, various aspects gave letters
legitimacy and the appearance of news articles published by Ekstra Bladet’s journalists.
Of the 50 most shared letters to the editor in our study, only three were written in rst
person, drew upon personal experience, and stylistically resembled letters to the editor
found in opinion pages (see Wahl-Jorgensen, 2004 for such criteria). Written in third
person, with consistent use of images, subheadings, statistics, and hyperlinks, the authors
of a majority of letters explicitly referred to their own content as “articles” and “news”.
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

9
Mimicking News
Of the 50 letters to the editor in our sample, 17 were also posted identically elsewhere
online on the same day as on The People’s Voice, often referenced directly as news: in
all cases, these additional postings were on nationalist-conservative or anti-Muslim blogs
or both. The ve most shared letters from The People’s Voice in our sample all revolved
around Muslims and immigrants, containing fearmongering headlines and promoting
conspiracy theories (see Table 1).
Table 1. TPV letters to the editor most frequently shared on Facebook
Headline
Facebook
shares Author, year
Research: Islam is the world’s most violent religion 23,369 Sennels, 2015 [1]
Alarming paragraph: Islam might be illegal according to
Danish law
14,736 Sennels, 2015 [2]
Vandalism against asylum centre led to 18 months in
prison – Immigrant assault led to 2 months
8,104 Frederiksen, 2015 [3]
Asylum director: The government has made Denmark
more attractive to asylum seekers
7,536 Mogensen, 2015 [4]
Four more years with Thorning [Danish prime minister]
will likely result in 128,000 additional Muslim immigrants
4,239 Mogensen, 2015 [5]
The most visible letters on The People’s Voice could be traced back to only a few au-
thors. Just twelve authors were responsible for the 50 most shared letters to the editor
in our sample. The most active user wrote 22 letters, accounting for 72,754 shares on
Facebook (59% in our sample). This user account belongs to Nicolai Sennels, former
leader of PEGIDA Denmark, the Danish branch of the German movement PEGIDA:
Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West [Patriotische Europäer gegen
die Islamisierung des Abendlandes]. Sennels is also a frequent contributor to hyperpar-
tisan online news platforms in Denmark, such as 24Nyt and NewSpeek, which have
been characterised as “junk news” outlets (Arnfred & Kjeldtoft, 2019). This indicates
a tactical use of The People’s Voice to legitimise partisan agendas. Among the twelve
authors of the 50 letters is also Daniel Carlsen, the former leader of the ethno-pluralist
Party of the Danes [Danskernes Parti] and leading member of Denmark’s National So-
cialist Movement [Danmarks Nationalsocialistiske Bevægelse]. These prominent nativ-
ist, nationalist-conservative activists voiced white nationalist agendas on The People’s
Voice, mastering a hybrid genre of news and opinion.
Of the 50 letters to the editor in our sample, 48 contained images and 41 contained
hyperlinked references. Authors used a total of 217 hyperlinks, indicating a writing style
mimicking journalistic referencing of sources. The most referenced sources in the let-
ters were, respectively, Wikipedia, a Danish blog named Cultural Radicalism Destroys
Denmark [Kulturradikalisme Smadrer Danmark], two established Danish news outlets
(Jyllands-Posten and Politiken), and The People’s Voice itself (see Table 2).
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

10
Johan Farkas & Christina Neumayer
Table 2. Five most referenced sources (left), five most referenced types of sources (right)
Most referenced sources # Most referenced source types #
Wikipedia 20 Danish news articles 69
Cultural Radicalism Destroys Denmark
(CRDD, Danish anti-Islamic/nationalist-
conservative blog) 15
Danish anti-Islamic/ Danish anti-
Islamic/nationalist-conservative blogs
or websites 33
Jyllands-Posten (Danish newspaper) 14 Foreign news articles 23
Politiken (Danish newspaper) 11 Encyclopaedias 20
The People’s Voice (Letters to the
editor) 10
Foreign anti-Islamic/nationalist-con-
servative blogs or websites 12
In a letter on The People’s Voice entitled “Research: Islam is the world’s most violent
religion”, which was shared 23,369 times on Facebook, author Nicolai Sennels wrote
in third person; used subheadings and a thematic (and stereotypical) image of a dark-
skinned, bearded man shouting; referred to results from research, statistics, and surveys;
and linked to external sources. The ve hyperlinks in the letter directed the reader to one
German and two Danish news outlets; a Danish book publisher; and an international anti-
Muslim website (thereligionofpeace.com), which has been described as being part of an
online “industry of Islamophobia” disseminating a “heavily biased worldview” (Chao,
2015: 58). Across the dataset, we nd that authors indistinguishably mixed hyperlinks
to partisan blogs, established news media, statistics from national agencies and research
institutions, nativist blogs, and other letters to the editor from The People’s Voice.
Across the letters, experts were often quoted in decontextualised ways to convey a
political message. For example, Interpol director Robert Noble was quoted as saying
“Close the borders or you will be attacked” (Sennels, 2016 [30]). A hyperlink led to a
2011 article from The Independent, in which the chief of Interpol argued for a system-
atic screening of passports in Europe but not for closing all borders (Hastings, 2011).
Along similar lines, a programme manager from the Bulgarian Red Cross was quoted
in a headline stating that “the government has made Denmark more attractive to asylum
seekers” (Mogensen, 2015 [4]). Tracing the source showed that a programme manager
indeed made a statement about Denmark becoming a destination for refugees but made
no mention of the Danish government (Borg, 2015). These examples illustrate that rac-
ist discourses take place not only at the border of civil and uncivil (as Krzyżanowski &
Ledin, 2017 contend) but also at the border of true and false.
Despite the incorrect quote of the programme manager from the Bulgarian Red
Cross, two members of Danish parliament – Martin Geertsen from the Liberal Party
[Venstre] and Pia Kjærsgaard from Danish People’s Party [Dansk Folkeparti] – shared
this letter from The People’s Voice on their public Facebook accounts (see Figure 3).
Both politicians (whose parties were in opposition at the time) referenced the letter and
explicitly blamed the government for an increase in immigrants. Kjærsgaard added to
her post: “Yeah, not exactly news that Thorning [Prime Minister] and De Radikale [party
of government] have made Denmark more attractive” (Kjærsgaard, 2015). Members of
parliament thus shared these as news articles written by journalists, thereby furthering
the normalising of racist discourses in the guise of legitimate news.
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

11
Mimicking News
Figure 3. Letter to the editor shared by Pia Kjærsgaard (MP, Danish People’s Party) and
Martin Geertsen (MP, Liberal Party)
While the sources cited are not entirely fake, they are at the borderline of true and
false and rendered credible by their perception as legitimate and reliable. In another
letter entitled “Professor: Muslims have killed 270 million people since Mohammad”,
the author referenced Bill Warner as an academic expert in support of the “fact” that
“Muslims have killed a total of 270 million non-Muslims” (Sennels, 2016 [14]). While
Warner is indeed a former professor, he is in the eld of physics (rather than political
science, history, or religion) and known for his controversial and one-sided critique of
Islam (Smietana, 2010). Similarly, a “German newspaper” was referenced to present
as a fact the conspiracy theory that Merkel was strategically using refugees to weaken
European nation states (Frederiksen, 2015 [18]). The German magazine in question has
repeatedly been criticised for sensationalist headlines and articles propagating anti-EU
and anti-immigrant conspiracy theories as well as for allowing authors to write for
the magazine with complete anonymity, thereby challenging principles of press ethics
(Boeselager, 2015). While the newspaper indeed exists, its credibility is questionable.
Through these links, The People’s Voice created openings between fringe media, blogs,
and websites of nativist and nationalist political actors, creating further legitimacy and
acceptability of otherwise uncivil sources.
The story: Discourses of exclusion and covert racism
The story of the Muslim Other on The People’s Voice built upon stereotypes pertinent
across Europe, yet through the legitimate presentation of these stories as “borderline
discourses” (Krzyżanowski & Ledin 2017), they were amplified, normalised, and
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

12
Johan Farkas & Christina Neumayer
stabilised. We found key logics of dierence and equivalence (see Dahlberg & Phelan,
2011: 19) feeding into stories across the letters. Overall, the 50 letters to the editor in our
sample addressed the following issues: Muslims and Islam (n=24), immigration (n=19),
terrorism (n=13), the European Union (n=10), crime (n=8, not including terrorism),
state benets (n=3), cannabis legalisation (n=3), and state privatisation (n=1). Letters
involving negative representations of immigrants and Muslims were shared most fre-
quently, comprising 88 per cent of shares on Facebook in our sample (109,361 shares).
The headlines of these letters contained clear characteristics of clickbait news (Blom
& Hansen, 2015; Kuiken et al., 2017), including sensationalist terms such as “shock”
and “destroy” as well as attention-grabbing sentences such as “See the numbers” and
“Denmark is dissolving”.
Across the letters, the subject position of Muslim, immigrant, migrant, and refugee
(often directly overlapping) were discursively positioned as dichotomous adversaries
of the Dane. Muslims and immigrants were continuously coupled through logics of
equivalence to violence, crime, terrorism, hypersexuality, deceitfulness, chaos, and
conspiracy, while Danes became “cattle for terrorists” (Sennels, 2016 [19]) who disguise
themselves as refugees and come “pouring across the borders” (Sennels, 2015 [24]).
According to the letters, “research” and “statistics” show that Muslims systematically
destroy Denmark while remaining invisible to the weak Danish political elites (Sennels,
2016 [20]). If politicians remain unwilling to make harsh and targeted anti-immigration
and anti-Islam policies, Denmark will ultimately cease to exist:
And at that point, Denmark will surely be called Denmarkistan… and somewhere in
Denmarkistan will be a statue of Lars Løkke [Prime Minister, Liberal Party], Søren
Pind [Minister of Justice, Liberal Party] and Inger Støjberg [Minister of Immigra-
tion and Integration, Liberal Party] in passionate embrace, and in elaborate Arabic
writing, it will say: “Here are those who destroyed Denmark”. (Sennels, 2016 [22])
Danish politicians from both centre-left and centre-right parties were presented as wil-
fully enabling a Muslim conspiracy, concealing the horric truth about Muslims and
immigrants. Their subject position was that of the traitor conspiring with the invading
enemy. While the Danish Social Democrats claim that crime is declining, they supposedly
conceal the truth that each day “more foreign criminals come to Denmark” (Mogensen,
2015 [37]). The politicians’ treachery is, according to several letters, caused by their
loyalty toward the corrupt European Union, which is controlled by greedy elites that
are hostile to the subject position of the Danes, represented as “the people”. German
Chancellor Angela Merkel plays a key role in this conspiracy narrative as she allegedly
seeks to spark a series of major national crises through immigration, which she plots to
use as a vehicle for creating a “United States of Europe” (Frederiksen, 2015 [23]). This
fact, the letters proclaimed, is supported by both statistics and credible sources. The plan
is supported by multinational corporations and the United Nations, which conspire to
“import cheap labour – even though it destroys our culture” (Sennels, 2015 [6]). This
discourse of an enormous conspiracy of powerful political, economic, and cultural-left
elites was combined with narratives of Islamisation.
Muslims were portrayed as hypersexual, violent, criminal, and deceitful by both nature
and culture, making them dichotomous adversaries of (white, Christian) Europeans,
who they will eventually replace. The notion that Muslims are conspiring to overthrow
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

13
Mimicking News
European countries has been labelled by researchers as the Eurabia conspiracy theory
and it is prevalent on nativist, nationalist-conservative blogs and social media channels
across Scandinavia (Ekman, 2015). The authors on The People’s Voice picked infor-
mation and sources to construct a political narrative presenting Muslims as the enemy,
for example by arguing that the Danish justice system privileges immigrants over “real
Danes” (Frederiksen, 2015 [3]), building on the populist narrative of “us” versus “them”
(Engesser et al., 2017).
Besides the use of questionable and cherry-picked sources and quotes, distorted sta-
tistics and gures were also used to create objectivity and legitimacy for the narratives.
In a statistical projection of the number of immigrants in Denmark, an inux of “120,000
immigrants per year” was reportedly expected (Frederiksen, 2015 [9]). This projection
was based on national statistics solely from two weeks of immigration in 2015, when
Europe experienced a peak in incoming refugees. The statistical projection was based on
ocial – yet extremely skewed – statistical data. Similarly, a prediction that Denmark
would receive “128,000 extra Muslim immigrants if Helle Thorning-Schmidt remains
prime minister” (Mogensen, 2015 [5]) was based on only one year of national statistics
(2014). The causal relationship between the prime minister and Muslim immigrants
was validated by a hyperlink to another letter on The People’s Voice, creating a circular
referencing, where distorted facts on the platform supported other distorted facts.
While deception based on inaccurate, cherry-picked or decontextualised data has
been a staple of xenophobic and racist discourses in the past (Daniels, 2013), the use
of a digital platform from an established news source as well as hyperlinks to both
established and fringe media, national statistics, and anti-Muslim nativists makes The
People’s Voice a potent case of amplication of racist discourses, far-right populist
rhetoric, and conspiracy theories. A majority of the references on The People’s Voice
could not be dismissed as mere falsehoods, although authors misled readers by cherry-
picking, decontextualising, simplifying, and overgeneralising information to support
racist agendas, packaged as news articles from Ekstra Bladet.
Conclusion
This study shows how a small group of highly active users tactically appropriated
Ekstra Bladet’s The People’s Voice to promote nativist narratives and far-right antago-
nism through a careful assemblage of manipulative visual cues, distorted facts, opaque
references, and populist rhetoric. Several of these authors were active contributors on
anti-Muslim blogs and hyperpartisan news sites, characterised by manipulative report-
ing (Arnfred & Kjeldtoft, 2019) and low levels of transparency (Heft et al., 2019). This
indicates that far-right activists tactically took advantage of The People’s Voice as an
extension of hyperpartisan channels, most likely to obtain legitimacy through Ekstra
Bladet. When public gures such as politicians shared these letters as news articles,
this further enhanced the credibility, visibility, and propagation of racist ideas as part
of mainstream political discourse.
In this study, racist discourse moved between the letters to the editor and their
sharing as news articles in legitimate public discourse, creating a hybrid news format
built around “borderline discourse” (Krzyżanowski & Ledin, 2017: 567), legitimising
racist antagonism via its presentation as legitimate news. This was enabled through
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

14
Johan Farkas & Christina Neumayer
The People’s Voice’s openness and lack of moderation coupled with the institutional
authority of Ekstra Bladet, creating a genre with little resemblance to the opinion pages in
traditional news (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2004). The People’s Voice enabled racist discourses at
the intersection of user practices, interfaces, and (lack of) policies and business models,
a form of “platformed racism” (Matamoros-Fernández, 2017: 930). The circulation of
the letters on Facebook increased the blurring of journalistic boundaries, as social media
contained few “of the cues that ordinarily allow us to identify and assess the source of
a story” (Vaidhyanathan, 2018: 5). Thereby, the letters became dicult to identify as
opinions of prominent far-right activists, rather than professional journalism.
There are limitations to this study in that it cannot asses the exact proliferation of
the analysed letters among Danish Facebook users nor conclude how many users were
potentially deceived. Despite these uncertainties, this research serves as an example of
a tactically assembled manipulative format, challenging Ekstra Bladet’s journalistic
authority from within and contributing to existing developments in which “journalistic
authority has increasingly become a topic of concern” (Carlson, 2017: 2). Rather than
arriving at an answer to how exactly such tactics take place and succeed, this research
opens up for further questions of how user-participation combined with the infrastructure
of a respected newspaper can produce hybrid formats that are at the borders of civil-
ity and also challenge the borders of journalistic work. As a recent study by Larsson
(2019) shows, actors from the political right are particularly visible on Facebook. The
tactics outlined in this paper are part of the repertoire of right-wing actors who utilise
emotional and aggressive language within the format of deceptive news articles to gain
user engagement and visibility.
Junk news and hyperpartisan media, manipulation, and deception predominantly
derive from outside established media institutions, such as fringe partisan outlets
(Arnfred & Kjeldtoft, 2019; Heft et al., 2019), conspiracy theory websites (Bradshaw
et al., 2019), news fabrication schemes (Tandoc et al., 2018), and automated social
media accounts (Bradshaw et al., 2019). The People’s Voice exemplies an established
institution’s attempt to increase clicks and engagement via a digital platform that would
not need much supervision. By doing so, Ekstra Bladet transgressed borders of journal-
ism by creating a bridge to hyperpartisan fringe media. This new manipulative format
furthered the pressure on journalistic boundaries.
The question remains as to which strategies are at media professionals’ disposal besides
the blunt instrument of simply shutting down such platforms (as eventually occurred with
The People’s Voice in 2018) as a means of coping with such hybrid forms of user-generated
content and journalism. There is a need for further understanding of how new forms of
professionalism can steer discussions in hybrid media systems, avoiding the spread of
misleading information and racism. The mimicking of news needs to be studied within
the context of changing media systems, platforms, interfaces, policies, actors, political
economies, and political cultures in order to understand the normalisation and legitimisa-
tion of racist discourses in hybrid formats between user-generated content and journalism.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Filip Wallberg for invaluable help with data on social media interac-
tions. The authors would also like to thank Tina Askanius, Jannick Schou and Nicholas W. Jankowski
for comments on the manuscript, and Thomas Harder from Ekstra Bladet for his responses.
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

15
Mimicking News
References
Alexa (2018). Top sites in Denmark. Retrieved March 12, 2019, from https://www.alexa.com/topsites/
countries/DK
Andreassen, A. M. (2015, June 18). Poul Madsen: »Man prøver at misbruge os med en fake historie« [Poul
Madsen: Someone’s trying to exploit us with a fake story]. Journalisten. http://journalisten.dk/poul-
madsen-man-proever-misbruge-os-med-en-fake-historie
Arnfred, C. E., & Kjeldtoft, S. S. (2019, April 17). Junk news: Mange nye netmedier manipulerer, vildleder
og stjæler fra andre [Junk news: Many new online media manipulate, mislead, and steal from others].
Politiken. https://politiken.dk/kultur/medier/art7148206/Mange-nye-netmedier-manipulerer-vildleder-
og-stjæler-fra-andre
Barlag, R. (2016, May 25). Ekstra Bladet er gået ”native” [Ekstra Bladet has gone “native”]. Journalisten.
https://journalisten.dk/ekstra-bladet-er-gaaet-native
Bendtsen, J. V. (2016, October 17). Ekstra Bladet piller debatindlæg af efter massiv kritik [Ekstra Bladet removes
debate post after massive criticism]. Politiken. http://politiken.dk/kultur/kultur_top/article5647465.ece
Blom, J. N., & Hansen, K. R. (2015). Click bait: Forward-reference as lure in online news headlines. Journal
of Pragmatics, 76, 87–100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.11.010
Boeselager, M. (2015, November 27). Wie seriös sind die „Deutschen Wirtschafts Nachrichten“? [How seri-
ous are the ‘Deutschen Wirtschafts Nachrichten’?] Vice. https://www.vice.com/de_ch/article/8gb7dk/
wie-serioes-sind-die-deutschen-wirtschafts-nachrichten-283
Borg, O. (2015, March 10). »Forbløende, hvor meget asylansøgere ved om størrelsen af sociale ydelser«
[Amazing, how much asylum seekers know about the size of social services]. Jyllands-Posten. https://
jyllands-posten.dk/protected/premium/international/ECE7529355/»Forbløende-hvor-meget-asylan-
søgere-ved-om-størrelsen-af-sociale-ydelser«
Bradshaw, S., Howard, P. N., Kollanyi, B., & Neudert, L.-M. (2019). Sourcing and automation of political
news and information over social media in the United States, 2016–2018. Political Communication.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1663322
Bro, P., & Wallberg, F. (2014). Digital gatekeeping: News media versus social media. Digital Journalism,
2(3), 446–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2014.895507
Carlson, M. (2015). Introduction: The many boundaries of journalism. In M. Carlson, & S. C. Lewis (Eds.),
Boundaries of journalism: Professionalism, practices and participation (pp. 1–18). New York: Routledge.
Carlson, M. (2017). Journalistic authority: Legitimating news in the digital era. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press.
Carlson, M., & Lewis, S. C. (Eds.) (2015). Boundaries of journalism: Professionalism, practices and par-
ticipation. New York: Routledge.
Chadwick, A. (2013). The hybrid media system: Politics and power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chao, E. C. (2015). The-truth-about-Islam.com: Ordinary theories of racism and cyber Islamophobia. Critical
Sociology, 41(1), 57–75. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920513508662
Dahlberg, L., & Phelan, S. (2011). Discourse theory and critical media politics. Bassingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Daniels, J. (2013). Race and racism in internet studies: A review and critique. New Media & Society, 15(5),
695–719. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812462849
Danmarks Statistik. (2018). Folketal [Population]. Retrieved December 17, 2019, from https://www.dst.dk/
da/Statistik/emner/befolkning-og-valg/befolkning-og-befolkningsfremskrivning/folketal
Dansk Journalistforbund (2018). Tidligere Cavlingprisvindere [Former Cavling Award winners]. Retrieved
February 23, 2018, from https://journalistforbundet.dk/tidligere-cavlingprisvindere
Danske Medier Research (2018). Toplisten [Top list]. Retrieved March 12, 2018, from http://www.fdim.dk/
statistik/internet/toplisten
De virale nyheder. (2019). Historisk [Historic]. Retrieved December 17, 2019, from https://deviralenyheder.
dk/?m=all
Eg, R., & Krumsvik, A. (2019). Personality lters for online news interest and engagement. Nordicom Review,
40(1), 177–194. https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2019-0021
Notes
1. All quotes originally in Danish have been translated by the authors.
2. It should be noted that the notion of “fake news” has increasingly come to function as a rhetorical weapon
in political debates (Farkas & Schou, 2018).
3. Developed by Filip Wallberg at the University of Southern Denmark.
4. The letters from The People’s Voice can be made available by the authors as PDFs upon request.
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

16
Johan Farkas & Christina Neumayer
Ekman, M. (2015). Online Islamophobia and the politics of fear: Manufacturing the green scare. Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 38(11), 1986–2002. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1021264
Ekstra Bladet (2016). Folkets Røst [The People’s Voice]. Archived in the Wayback Machine. Retrieved Oc-
tober 23, 2019, from https://web.archive.org/web/20160309063631/http://ekstrabladet.dk/folkets-roest/
Engesser, S., Fawzi, N., & Larsson, A. O. (2017). Populist online communication: Introduction to the special
issue. Information Communication and Society, 20(9), 1279–1292. https://doi.org/10.1080/136911
8X.2017.1328525
Farkas, J., & Schou, J. (2018). Fake news as a oating signier: Hegemony, antagonism and the politics
of falsehood, Javnost – The Public, 25(3), 298–314. https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2018.1463047
Farkas, J., Schou, J., & Neumayer, C. (2018). Platformed antagonism: Racist discourses on fake Muslim Face-
book pages. Critical Discourse Studies. 15(5), 463–480. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2018.1450276
Garrett, R. K., Long, J., & Jeong, M. (2019). From partisan media to misperception: Aective polarization as
Mediator. Journal of Communication. 69(5), 490–517, https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqz028
Giglietto, F., Ianelli, L., Rossi, L., & Valeriani, A. (2019). ‘Fake news’ is the invention of a liar: How
false information circulates within the hybrid news system. Current Sociology. https://doi.
org/10.1177/0011392119837536
Hastings, R. (2011, December 30). Exclusive: Interpol chief – close EU border loophole or risk attack. The
Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/exclusive-interpol-chief-close-eu-
border-loophole-or-risk-attack-6282991.html
Heft, A., Mayerhöer, E., Reinhardt, S., & Knüpfer, C. (2019). Beyond Breitbart: Comparing right‐wing digital
news infrastructures in six western democracies. Policy & Internet. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.219
Hemmeth, A. [@hemmeth]. (2016, October 17). Flere i min omgangskreds har delt indlægget, og troede
det var en reel artikel. Skidt for DK. Skidt for @EkstraBladet Troværdighed #dkmedier [Several of
my acquaintances have shared this post, thinking it was a real article. Bad for Denmark. Bad for the
credibility of @EkstraBladet Credibility #dkmedier] [Thumbnail with link attached] [Tweet]. Twitter.
https://twitter.com/hemmeth/status/787910773389623296
Howard, P. N., Bolsover, G., Kollanyi, B., Bradshaw, S., & Neudert, L. M. (2017). Junk news and bots during
the US election: What were Michigan voters sharing over Twitter? ComProp, OII, Data Memo.
Karlsson, M., & Clerwall, C. (2013). Negotiating professional news judgment and “clicks”: Comparing
tabloid, broadsheet and public service traditions in Sweden. Nordicom Review, 34(2), 65–76. https://
doi.org/10.2478/nor-2013-0054
Kjeldtoft, S. S. (2016, February 5). Skal medierne opdrage på ’racistiske’ debattører? [Should the media
chastise “racist” users?] Information. Retrieved October 23, 2019, from https://www.information.dk/
kultur/2016/02/medierne-opdrage-paa-racistiske-debattoerer
Kjærsgaard, P. (2015, June 10). Ja, ikke just nogen nyhed at Thorning og de radikale har gjort Danmark mere
attraktivt ved af fjerne starthjælpen til asylansøgere og åbne grænserne [Yeah, not exactly news that
Thorning and De Radikale have made Denmark more attractive with start aid for asylum seekers and
open borders] [Image attached]. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=101
53559530764384&id=33510214383
Krzyżanowski, M., & Ledin, P. (2017). Uncivility on the web populism in/and the borderline discourses of
exclusion. Journal of Language and Politics, 16(4), 566–581. https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17028.krz
Kuiken, J., Schuth, A., Spitters, M., & Marx, M. (2017). Eective headlines of newspaper articles in a digital
environment. Digital Journalism, 5(10), 1300–1314. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1279978
Larsson, A. O. (2018). “I shared the news today, oh boy”: News provision and interaction on Facebook.
Journalism Studies, 19(1), 43–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1154797
Larsson, A. O. (2019). Right-wingers on the rise online: Insights from the 2018 Swedish elections. New Media
& Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819887700
Laclau, E., & Moue, C. (2001). Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
(2nd ed.). London: Verso Books.
Lee, A. M., & Chyi, H. I. (2014). When newsworthy is not noteworthy: Examining the value of news
from the audience’s perspective. Journalism Studies, 15(6), 807–820. https://doi.org/10.1080/146167
0X.2013.841369
Madsen, P. [@pomaEB]. (2016, October 16). Hvorfor Sammenstillingen? Medier Indeholder Journalistik
Og Holdninger. Dette Er Brugernes Eget Univers [Why the comparison? Media contain journalism and
opinions. This is the users’ own space] [Replying to Lars Werge (@larswerge)] [Tweet]. Twitter. https://
twitter.com/pomaEB/status/787721105461088256
Matamoros-Fernández, A. (2017). Platformed racism: The mediation and circulation of an Australian race-
based controversy on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Information, Communication & Society, 20(6),
930–946. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1293130
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC

17
Mimicking News
Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s) and Nordicom. This is an Open Access article distributed under
the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
McNair, B. (2017). After objectivity?: Schudson’s sociology of journalism in the era of post-factuality. Jour-
nalism Studies, 18(10), 1318–1333. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2017.1347893
Mediearbejdsgiverne. (2010, June 25). Berlingske.dk og Ekstra Bladets nationen.dk vandt FDIM-Priser
[Berlingske.dk and Ekstra Bladet’s nationen.dk won FDIM Awards.].REtrieved Marsch 12, 2018
Mediearbejdsgiverne. https://mediearbejdsgiverne.dk/nyhed/berlingskedk-og-ekstra-bladets-natio-
nendk-vandt-fdim-priser
Neumayer, C., & Svensson, J. (2016). Activism and radical politics in the digital age: Towards a typol-
ogy. Convergence, 22(2), 131–146.
Nygren, T., & Guath, M. (2019). Swedish teenagers’ diculties and abilities to determine digital news cred-
ibility. Nordicom Review, 40(1), 23–42. https://doi.org/10.2478/nor-2019-0002
Phillips, W. (2018). The oxygen of amplication: Better practices for reporting on extremists, antagonists,
and manipulators. Data & Society Research Institute. Retrieved October 23, 2019. https://datasociety.
net/output/oxygen-of-amplication/.
Phillips, W., & Milner, R. M. (2017). The ambivalent internet: Mischief, oddity, and antagonism online.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Richardson, J. E., & Stanyer, J. (2011). Reader opinion in the digital age: Tabloid and broadsheet
newspaper websites and the exercise of political voice. Journalism, 12(8), 983–1003. https://doi.
org/10.1177/1464884911415974
Rossi, L., Schwartz, S., & Mahnke, M. (2016). Social media use & political engagement in Denmark. DECIDIS
Report. Copenhagen: IT University of Copenhagen.
Sahl, J. (2017, October 10). Ekstrabladet.dk fylder 20 år: Se den vilde udvikling [Ekstrabladet.dk celebrates
20 years: See the crazy development]. Ekstra Bladet. https://ekstrabladet.dk/nyheder/samfund/ekstrabla-
detdk-fylder-20-aar-se-den-vilde-udvikling/6863861
Smietana, B. (2010, October 24). Anti-Muslim crusaders make millions spreading fear. Tennessean. https://
www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/2010/10/24/antimuslim-crusaders-make-millions-spreading-
fear/28936467/
Tandoc, E. C., Lim, Z. W., & Ling. R. (2018). Dening ‘fake news’: A typology of scholarly denitions.
Digital Journalism, 6(2), 137–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1360143
Topping, A. (2013). Oxford child sex abuse ring: Seven jailed for torture and rape of girls. The Guardian.
Retrieved December 17, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jun/27/oxford-child-abuse-
seven-men-jailed.
Vaidhyanathan, S. (2018). Antisocial media: How Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2004). Playground of the pundits or voice of the people?: Comparing British and Danish
opinion pages. Journalism Studies, 5(1), 59–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670032000174747
Wahl-Jorgensen, K., Williams, A., Sambrook, R., Harris, J., Garcia-Blanco, I., Dencik, L., Cushion, S., Carter,
C., & Allan, S. (2016). The Future of Journalism. Journalism Studies, 17(7), 801–807. https://doi.org/
10.1080/17512786.2018.1510648
Yin, R. K. (2009). Case study research: Design and methods. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications.
Unauthentifiziert | Heruntergeladen 28.01.20 12:54 UTC