Annett Heft’s research while affiliated with Freie Universität Berlin and other places

... In Cushion's study, it is seen that both right-wing and left-wing alternative media entities, together with their respective viewership, maintain the perspective that the press institution is not meeting its own established criteria [14]. Moreover, Heft, Ramsland and Mayerhöffer also see the conventional news media as insufficiently representing a wide array of viewpoints [15]. Therefore, the use of politically or socially and culturally radical content and style by alternative news organisations to redress perceived structural inequalities has considerable editorial importance. ...

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Assessing the Impact of Autonomous Media Organizations on Contemporary Society

... Recently, Telegram emerged as the most relevant (alternative) platform for the organization and mobilization of COVID-19 related protests (Curley et al., 2022;Simon et al., 2022;Zehring & Domahidi, 2023), but also for conspiracy movements Schulze et al., 2022), and far-right actors (Schulze, 2021;Vieten, 2020). ...

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Virtual torches - real fires? Online protest mobilization as a forward indicator of politically motivated crimes

... Affordances therefore a) are not the technology itself; b) are not a feature or the outcome of the technology; and c) have variability that can be measured in terms of degree as opposed to a binary. While extant research consistently speaks to how affordances mediate users' and behavioral outcomes (Baden et al., 2024;Buehling and Heft 2023;Lou et al. 2021;Peeters and Willaert 2022;Pereira et al. 2010;Santos et al. 2021;Wijermars and Lokot 2022), actual application of the concept to identify affordances is varied across social media platforms in general, and Telegram in particular. Proposed Telegram affordances include self-embedding and networking that enable collective and connective action for protests ; customizability, accessibility, aesthetics, and simultaneity as enabling news consumption (Lou et al. 2021), as well as the "subversive affordances" that emerge from Telegram's native proxy feature that supported circumvention of Russia's Telegram ban (Santos et al. 2021). ...

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Tactics and affordances in the mediatization of war: pro-Ukrainian cyber resistance on Telegram

... Moreover, they demand a trustful relationship between researchers and participants, and it can be difficult to record the actual conversation without interfering with the situation. Fourth, social media debates are predetermined by platform affordances regarding a user base (which may be biased toward certain demographics) and mode of communication (which may restrict the conversation to text only; Heft et al. 2023). Fifth, ethnographies are context bound and demanding in terms of researcher involvement in the field. ...

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Everyday Conversations About Economic Inequality: A Research Agenda

... The umbrella terms of anti-feminism (Goetz and Mayer, 2023;Stögner, 2022), anti-gender politics (Graff and Korolczuk, 2022;Paternotte and Kuhar, 2018), or also anti-genderism (Hark and Villa, 2015;Reinhardt et al., 2023) capture the social and political backlash to the promotion of gender equality (Verloo, 2018). This article adopts the notion of anti-gender mobilization to denote the politically oriented organized opposition to gender equality beyond hegemonic heteronormative, cis-gender identities. ...

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Rallying 'round the Drag: Anti-gender Mobilization and the Mainstreaming of the Far Right

... Auch Erfahrungsberichte und Reflexionen zu Softwarelösungen sind in dieser Kategorie möglich. Beispiele dafür sind Software Reviews zur Annotationssoftware BRAT Rapid Annotation Tool (Strippel, Laugwitz, Paasch-Colberg, Esau, & Heft, 2022), zur MeTag App und MeTag Analyze (Mascheroni & Zaffaroni, 2022) sowie zum R-Paket Rtoot für die Erhebung und Analyse von Mastodon-Daten (Schoch & Chan, 2023;Wedel, 2023). ...

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Neue Publikationsformate zu offenen Infrastrukturen und Ressourcen für die Kommunikations-und Medienforschung: Ein Erfahrungsbericht

... The network analyses in our sample countries repeated the result according to which the Twitter networks in the 2019 EP election campaigns were very much nationally oriented. Thus, even if there appeared to be clear 'vertical Europeanisation' of national publics so that European issues were debated in national contexts (Koopmans & Erbe, 2004), few transnational linkages were found except in Germany and in Ireland: in Germany, the campaign debates were actively connected to Austrian Twitter networks (see also Heft et al., 2022), and the Irish election campaigns were linked to the British Twittersphere. ...

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Comparison and Conclusions: What Twitter Campaigns Tell Us About Populism and Europeanisation of National Public Spheres?

... Increasing interest in studying social media use in EP election campaigns has also demonstrated that Facebook has provided opportunities to all parties -including those marginalised in their national party fields and in mainstream media -to promote their agendas in campaigns (Bene, 2021). Furthermore, studies have indicated that agendas promoted by populist radical right parties such as anti-immigration and anti-elitism are transnational and foster the most audience engagement in Facebook, but there are also significant differences between the countries in this that highlight the national framings in social media campaign communication (Heft et al., 2022a;Bene et al., 2022). In addition, a comparative analysis of Twitter use in all 28 EU countries during the EP 2019 elections found that most linkages between the tweeters were national, and that campaigns traditionally followed the parties' positions on the EU (Stier et al., 2021). ...

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Introduction: European Public Sphere, Populism and Twitter

... Although anti-elitism and political moralism are fundamental components of populism and have the position of sufficient conditions for its definition, these concepts can be applied more broadly and are not confined solely to the populist political sphere. Anti-elitism, characterized firmly by a stringent critique of elites (Vaughan and Heft 2023), arises from a general disdain for elitist politics, while political moralism can be instinctual across a wide array of political groups. Several cases of political actors were observed who engaged in anti-elitism or political moralism in their communication without the populist elements. ...

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Moralism without populism? The salience of corruption in the electoral manifestos and legislature speeches of Czech and Slovak parties

... Enquanto a conspiração se refere à ideia de arranjo secreto que envolve grupos poderosos, a teoria da conspiração consiste no roteiro que estrutura a explicação alternativa propriamente dita, sendo ambas, hoje, também abrangidas nas pesquisas sobre desinformação on-line (Heft;Buehling, 2022), de forma associada à crise epistêmica da atualidade. Para Aggio (2021), crenças conspiratórias têm base informacional, cognitiva e epistêmica, e um de seus traços elementares é a refutação da autoridade epistêmica validada socialmente. ...

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Fraude nas urnas e contestação eleitoral no Brasil: análise multiplataforma de atores políticos, viés conspiratório e moderação de conteúdo