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

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Publications (36)


Copycats? Do right-wing groups emulate left-wing digital advocacy organizations?
  • Article

October 2024

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2 Reads

Journal of Information Technology & Politics

Nina Hall

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Annett Heft

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Cross-Border Journalism Content: Status Quo and Perspectives

January 2024

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17 Reads

The chapter outlines the state of research regarding the specific characteristics of cross-border journalism content. It starts with a broad definition of cross-border journalism, briefly introducing the various producers of cross-border content. This includes transnational and global media, national media that transnationalize their reporting, foreign correspondents, and especially cross-border collaborative journalism networks. The chapter then discusses the specific characteristics of those actors in terms of their goals and approaches regarding transnational reporting and summarizes the extant research on the features of their journalistic products, specifically the degree of transnationality in their content as well as other particularities.



Politicization and Right-Wing Normalization on YouTube: A Topic-Based Analysis of the "Alternative Influence Network"

November 2023

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32 Reads

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1 Citation

International Journal of Communication

Scholarship has highlighted the rise of political influencer networks on YouTube, raising concerns about the platform's propensity to spread and even incentivize politically extreme content. While many studies have focused on YouTube's algorithmic infrastructure, limited research exists on the actual content in these networks. Building on Lewis's (2018) classification of an "alternative influencer" network, we apply structural topic modeling across all text-based autocaptions from her study's sample to identify common topics featured on these channels. This allows us to gauge which topics appear together and to trace politicization over time. Through network analysis, we determine channel similarities and evaluate whether deplatformed channels influenced topic shifts. We find that political topics increasingly dominate the focus of all analyzed channels. The convergence of culture and politics occurs mostly about identity-driven issues. Furthermore, more extreme channels do not form distinct clusters but blend into the larger content-based network. Our findings illustrate how political topics may function as connective ties across an initially more diverse network of YouTube influencer channels.


Erratum zu: Die Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur – eine Lösung infrastruktureller Bedarfe für die Inhaltsanalyse?
  • Article
  • Full-text available

October 2023

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15 Reads

Publizistik

Download

Pandemic Protesters on Telegram: How Platform Affordances and Information Ecosystems Shape Digital Counterpublics

September 2023

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60 Reads

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7 Citations

Social Media + Society

This study analyzes how platform affordances, their appropriation by movement actors, and these actors’ leveraging of information ecosystems—in combination—helped form a digital counterpublic during the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws on public communication data sent by more than 300 Telegram channels and group chats affiliated with the Querdenken movement over a 2-year period, and combines automated and manual text classification with network analysis. The study demonstrates how Telegram afforded connective and collective action in distinct ways that reflected the movement’s organizational structure and aims, as well as the impact of individual information-sharing on the process of movement-building itself. Accounting for time-dependent dynamics, the study also found that different parts of the counterpublic latched onto and sustained distinct information ecosystems to articulate their claims and mobilize contentious action.




Die Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur – eine Lösung infrastruktureller Bedarfe für die Inhaltsanalyse?The national research data infrastructure—a solution for infrastructural needs of content analysis?

July 2023

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47 Reads

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1 Citation

Publizistik

Zusammenfassung Obwohl die Inhaltsanalyse eine zentrale Stellung in der Kommunikations- und Medienforschung besitzt, existieren kaum Forschungsinfrastrukturen für diese Methode. Gleichzeitig werden in Deutschland seit 2018 große Dateninfrastrukturen in den 27 Konsortien der Nationalen Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) aufgebaut. In diesem Beitrag gehen wir aus Perspektive der Forschenden der Frage nach, inwiefern die NFDI-Konsortien Lösungen für die infrastrukturellen Anforderungen in Bezug auf Inhaltsanalysen bieten. Zunächst beleuchten wir diese Anforderungen entlang des Forschungsdaten-Lebenszyklus und identifizieren Leerstellen. Dann explorieren wir, welche Bedarfe die NFDI-Konsortien decken können. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf Konsortien, die sich auf die Sammlung und Aufbereitung von Text oder multimodalen Daten konzentrieren: KonsortSWD, BERD@NFDI, Text+, NFDI4Memory, NFDI4Culture und NFDI4DataScience . Unsere Untersuchung zeigt, dass die Konsortien bereits viele der Bedarfe abdecken. Allerdings gibt es weder ein Konsortium, in dem Kommunikationswissenschaftler:innen treibende Kräfte sind, noch wird die Inhaltsanalyse explizit berücksichtigt. Wir diskutieren, wie sich Forschungsinfrastrukturen für die Inhaltsanalyse durch die NFDI-Strukturen weiterentwickeln ließen.


Same, same but different? Explaining issue agendas of right-wing parties’ Facebook campaigns to the 2019 EP election

June 2023

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15 Reads

Party Politics

Social media are important for right-wing parties to communicate with and mobilize potential voters in election campaigns. Our study focuses on the Facebook campaigns of right-wing parties in six European countries and aims to understand which issues were transnationally shared and which ones emphasize national perspectives on the agenda of the populist actors. We ask what context conditions on the party- and country-level determine the individual issue agendas. Using structural topic modelling, we analyze the communication of the Austrian FPÖ, the German AfD, the French RN, the Italian Lega, the Polish PiS, and the Swedish SD during the 2019 EP election campaign. To explain their issue agendas, we run logistic regression models testing the influence of country-specific and party-specific factors. Our analyses establish that while right-wing parties across Europe are similar in pushing a few populist issues like blaming elites and immigration, they still engage in campaigning on national politics.


Citations (27)


... 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. ...

Reference:

Assessing the Impact of Autonomous Media Organizations on Contemporary Society
Right Topic, Right Source? Source Diversity and Balance in Right-Wing Alternative News Content Across Topics
  • Citing Article
  • December 2023

Journalism Studies

... 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). ...

Mapping a Dark Space: Challenges in Sampling and Classifying Non- Institutionalized Actors on Telegram
  • Citing Article
  • January 2023

Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft

... 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). ...

Pandemic Protesters on Telegram: How Platform Affordances and Information Ecosystems Shape Digital Counterpublics
  • Citing Article
  • September 2023

Social Media + Society

... 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. ...

Challenges of and approaches to data collection across platforms and time: Conspiracy-related digital traces as examples of political contention
  • Citing Article
  • August 2023

Journal of Information Technology & Politics

... 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. ...

Varieties of antigenderism: the politicization of gender issues across three European populist radical right parties
  • Citing Article
  • August 2023

Information Communication and Society

... 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). ...

BRAT Rapid Annotation Tool

Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft

... 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. ...

Mobilization and support structures in radical right party networks. Digital political communication ecologies in the 2019 European parliament elections

Information Communication and Society

... 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). ...

Transnational issue agendas of the radical right? Parties’ Facebook campaign communication in six countries during the 2019 European Parliament election
  • Citing Article
  • June 2022

European Journal of Communication

... 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. ...

Anti‐elitism in the European Radical Right in Comparative Perspective
  • Citing Article
  • May 2022

JCMS Journal of Common Market Studies

... 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. ...

Measuring the diffusion of conspiracy theories in digital information ecologies

Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies