 Our next speaker is born and raised in Germany. He lives and works as a PhD student in Canada, as a member of a research group on extremist politics and democratic systems. And he'll give us an insight into the public discourse in Germany focused on the so-called Alternative for Deutschland. Please welcome Alexander Bayer. Thank you very much. Thank you people for showing up in the Zalborg. Thank you to the internet for watching. Very big thank you for the organizers for giving me the opportunity to give this little talk. Yeah, my name is Alexander Bayer. And everywhere I went this winter, I didn't have to wear a winter jacket because the temperatures were very mild. And I will tell you in a minute why that matters. As already said, I'm a member of a research group in Vancouver, where we look at what happens how extremist parties and politics fair in democratic systems. And we decided to focus this research project on the fascinating for researchers fascinating case of Germany and asking the questions if we can point fingers. And is it a valid judgment to say the media, the media is to blame for the rise of the AFD. For anyone who decided at the end of 2017 that they would spend most of 2016 in hibernation, which seemed like a pretty good idea at the time, I will give a quick rundown what happened. So we had an election in September. And the domino piece that was Germany fell domino piece in a sense that all around in Europe far-right parties had considerable success in the past, in the recent past. And Germany was the last stalwart in Central Europe where a far-right party did not get into government. This happened in September. And it did not only get into parliament, it also the way that it looks like now it might become the official leader of the opposition. So when these results came in, pundits were really, really quick to call the shots. The dominating sentiment was that it was the media's fault. They took the positions of the AFD and gave disproportionate amounts of coverage to this far-right extremist party. And this sentiment had a lot of truthiness to it. So it had a lot of, yeah, sure, I can see why that. Everyone that opened this newspaper or opened a news website, stories about the AFD seemed or about something that's related to the AFD seemed to dominate coverage. This went along with a little bit of a felt truth, a truth that was perceived by people about how the campaigning season was a lot of season and not a lot of campaigning, despite Martin Schulz's best efforts, a whole lot of sunshine, but not a lot of conflict. And this was something that then was perceived to be very, well, I don't want to say very skillfully, but somehow filled by the AFD and the topics that are of concern to this party. So what are we doing today here? First off, I'm a political scientist by trade and political scientists like theory. I know that this is an event where theory might not at the forefront of everyone's minds, but it is for me, because talking and arguing to political scientists about theory is like mud wrestling with a pig. You do that for two or three hours, and then you realize, oh, this pig actually enjoys this. So I'll have one slide on what previous theories would suggest have happened and how it could have happened. Then I'll show you what kind of data we have collected to systematically answer this question and talk about public discourse in Germany, then to the meat and potatoes of the talk about how the campaign unfolded in the media. And then to end, I will show some more data that is a bit different that paints a picture on why this election was a special election and why it was sort of a perfect storm of an election for a far-right party and why this actually makes us claim that the media could be said to have behaved pretty reasonable as a little teaser. OK, theory, one slide. Two possible mechanisms of media effects. There is this normative, very endearing and wonderful idea that if you read something and someone carefully crafts and he or she constructs an argument that is well-written, well-made, you read this, you take it in, you're persuaded by that regardless of what this argument is. 60 years of media research suggests that this doesn't happen. Pre-existing opinions are extremely difficult to change in each and every single one of us, even though we're likely to admit that, no, no, no, sure, I'm a rational thinker. I take standpoints if they're convincing to me and I internalize them, but it's not how this works. The second possible effect and the one that will be of concern to us today at the core of the presentation is something that's called priming. So the media can't tell people what to think, it can't persuade people independently of the previous opinions that people have, but it's really, really successful in telling people what to think about. It's super good, the media is super good. Reading something is very effective in bringing something to the front of your mind. And here I can tell you why I told you about my choice of attire in winter. The vast majority of you probably thought when I said this, oh, I don't know if it's winter jacket. Wow, who is this guy? But maybe a few of you thought, yeah, sure, it was pretty mild, that's climate change. So without naming the issue, there's a chance that I primed a few of you to consider climate change and pull that in your frontal lobe at the front of your mind. And this is important, this is the central thing that we have to consider if we ask if the media wrote up a party like the AfD. Also important to consider here is that priming is easier or there's an indirect effect of priming as well where a topic that is owned by a specific party, that's the thing that then favors the party subsequently. So if the media writes a lot about refugees, a xenophobic far-right party that has this problem of refugees at the core of their agenda will reap in benefits in our minds, in that its agenda will fall on fertile to our ground. So far, the theory, that's all. So what do we do based on this theory? We collected data, lots of data. We have, we understand this data to be, we understand this text that we collected to be data and we use natural language processing to analyze it. Natural language processing basically means that we're giving language to a computer that wasn't written specifically to be understood by a computer and try to extract meaningful analysis based on what the computer is doing with this. So we use some sifting methods to collect about 8,500 articles from four central German news websites, Fokus, Bild, Welt, and Spiegel and we have that results in a unique data set that to our knowledge, no one else has. If so, please reach out to us. And this data set is so unique that it deserves at least six fire emojis. It is also pretty exciting because that was pretty cheap. We were two people that were many concerned with collecting this data and I don't wanna calculate my hourly wage but it was almost done with no financial expense. And this is cool because we're social scientists, we're faced with this problem with this very interesting case of Germany sort of falling in line, very delayed with lots of other countries around it in terms of the foreign party getting their scenes in parliament and we can use methods that are available to us for sort of like sitting down and reading a stack overflow and teaching those methods to us to systematically try to answer this question. Let's dive right in. The share of party mentions in online news. So what we did for each day, we calculated what the total number of mentioned political actors is. We did that based on work lists that we carefully crafted that included candidates' names and party abbreviations and party names and things like Kanzlerin and Kanzlerkandidat for the CDU CSU and the SPD respectively and we let that thing rip through our little R script that we have. So the average of mentions of each party over the course of the campaign looks something like this. Between July 1st and September 24th, that's the timeframe that we concentrated on. We see a clear incumbency bonus, the Kanzlerkandidat bonus for the CDU CSU, social democrats, high 20s and the AFD at 10.7%. Here we might say at the smaller parties, a little note to the green and the left. So with this dictionary method, it's kind of tricky because we can't say, oh yeah, well we're just gonna count every occurrence of grüne and linke for the green party and the left party because then we get stuff like the green banana and the left hand that is counted for them. So that's why here we're only using candidates' names, that's why they probably, they sort of underperform but for our purpose of talking about if the AFD got favored by the media, we're sort of letting that drop out of the table. So the story here is over the course of the campaign 10.7% of mentions were happening that mentioned the AFD, basically case closed, right? AFD got 12.7% in the election. That doesn't really sound like it was favored by the media. And a few of you might know this, this analysis from a blog post that me and Konstantin Kurtz wrote for NetsPolitik sort of like 45 seconds after the election when we worked on truncated data and we also focused on print, on print media. And this is sort of what this graph looked like that we based our conclusion on AFD didn't really get any disproportionate amount of coverage. It actually is in the last week of the campaign, last week's of the campaign actually is outperformed by the FTP. Science is the current state of airing or the, so now that we have better data in terms of online news data, this whole story looks a bit different if we take the average over the whole course of the campaign and actually have it shown to us day by day. This is what I wanna focus on now. So just looking at the sort of tail end of this all the way to the right when we get close to the election date, the order of this is surprisingly close to the actual election results. The parties actually do get in in the order that they came out of the election. But we do see a little curve that gets closer to a curve that should be bigger. And this is where the, well, I don't wanna say magic but this is where the interesting stuff lies. So let's look at the curves one after the other. The CDUC is you as you would expect as the incumbent anything that is remotely political in domestic and international politics will score mentions for the chancellor and the CDUC is you. That's why this curve is considerably higher than the others but we do see a downward tendency the closer we get to the campaign when campaign coverage shifted from the incumbent to the competitors especially the underdog competitors which is kind of, that's a bad transfer to the SPD now but if we look at the curve of the social democratic party there's a slight bump around August and Martin Schultz really tried to drive home this issue of justice as the central campaign promise and there's another little slight hump around September 1st beginning of September when the televised debate happened but the overall trend is pretty linear it doesn't seem to be if we would just smooth this plot out to be a straight line it probably would be pretty much horizontal not so for the AFD so remember over the course of the campaign they got 10.7% on average of mentions and that's true if we calculate an average of that of course this looks like it scores considerably lower than the two major parties but something happens in late August and all of a sudden this party gets actually close to the social democrats starting in late August the tendency becomes one that is pretty considerably upwards and if we take the average of only the two last weeks before the election we get to a number of 19.6% of all mentions are talking about the AFD there which is something if we think about the mechanisms of priming those are short-term effects we're looking for things that happen over a short-term or have an effect in a pretty short-term so this is something that is extremely, extremely important at the beginning of this timeframe where the plot becomes something that has a trend that shows upwards around like August 28th where the first little mountain, first little summit occurs two things happened one, a refugee boat capsized in the Mediterranean an event that we sadly have to see terrifyingly often and 100 people died and the second thing that happened was that Alexander Gauland in an interview claimed that a German politician should be dumped in Anatolia and it's interesting if you talk about if you extract the topics that are covered in relation to the AFD before and after this moment before this August 28th it's a lot about Alice Weidl writing emails where it turns out she's not the public persona that she claims she is and it's a lot about internal rifts of this far-right party the internal tensions between the super far-right wing and the far-right wing and afterwards there's a surprising amount of citations of this oh, we should dump this person in another country so that's something that indicates that this strategy of sort of provoking a scandal paid off but before we get into that let's look into the topics that were covered over the course of the campaign we did the same thing we developed topic dictionaries with keywords for each category and we let our script read through all the data and count occurrences so looking at this we see a sort of band there in 10% rage where it's all a colorful rainbow where the topics don't really diverge from each other except for that topic of domestic security which is there at the low end of the range but we do have one topic that stands out quite considerably in the early months of the Vakam Sommar which is European Union general European Union topic this is because on July 1st Helmut Kohl, the eternal chancellor got the first European Act of State and a lot of things were written about his legacy in terms of the European Union and lots of people showed up from Strasbourg and Brussels and paid their respects this is why this topic seems like or this is why this topic comes in as strong as it does here another topic that has a sort of unusual curve here on our graph is the topic of the environment our dictionaries that we developed were topical and so what causes this steep, steep summit there in early August is the diesel Gipfel there the diesel summit where German car manufacturers tried to sort of get out of the fact that they basically ripped off customers with selling cars that emitted toxic amounts of poisonous gas and dust this is why this is extremely important in the low 40% range in early August but afterwards the trend line points steeply down a topic that was pretty consistent over the course of the campaign in its overall dynamic or at the sort of, not the overall dynamic but the role that it played is the topic of immigration and immigration means migration and refugees in our case here and now thinking about what that means in relation to our theory on priming we would think that, sure that's a topic that is owned by the AFD and it's super tightly connected to that party's rise so this is something that does favor a far right party like those are like it is but we can do a sort of more systematic investigation into this so this graph shows you the polls each dot represents polling results for the AFD and the line is the average out of those polls again over the course of the timeframe that we surveyed pretty much constant until mid-August and all of a sudden we have increasing variants and we have a tendency, a trend line that points upwards and now this is where the heart of the story lies is this, is this dependent on the mentions that the AFD got in the media this is the orange line now we have a different scale of our graph that's why it looks way more nervous than in the bigger one that we had difficult to say if you have data like this, time series data you actually wanna get rid of trends in terms of what the analysis should be like so one way to do this in a graphic representation is by not showing the absolute values and how they develop but only showing the change from day to day and plotting that this is what this graph does so here these two lines dance around the zero mark because especially the blue one where it's the polling results there wasn't a lot of variation from day to day it's an incremental steps that the curve points up and down it gets a bit more a bit higher in variants around after the mid-August and whereas the AFD mentions in the media they stay, well they stay rich in variants hard to tell if anything systematic is there you would think that after the sort of first third of August those lines are connected we ran an analysis, a vector order regression model time series statistics we couldn't find any systematic relation in a time frame that made sense for our theory on priming which is a few days that we're looking for so if you talk about time series we talk about lag and lead and so you try to connect a data point that is further down the line with a data point that is not as far down the line and nothing of statistical significance showed up here and this kind of stumped us we thought right when we looked at this there was something we sort of took a step back and we considered another possibility to as why to as to why the media reported as they did that the media just give the people what the people want it and here is why I want to talk to you about why this was a special election this graph I adapted this graph from the Berliner Morgenpost and they based it on surveys conducted by InfraRestimup onto the data I didn't have any access to but this impressively shows why there was a special election in five out of the six preceding elections employment was the topic that was on top of people's minds when they made the decision in terms of which party to vote for and employment means unemployment in 2017 with unemployment being at record lows and after 2015 having or having a Syrian civil war still going on having refugees come into into Western into Europe immigration jumps on out as the topic that was the most important for people and here if we look at also the the topics that are further down the important scale for voters those are all topics where one could conceivably think that those can be spun in a way that they are connected to this refugee situation social justice, economic injustice that's something that a party like the AFT can very effectively turn into an idea on group-based conflict it's us versus them same with pensions those people come here to take our jobs and our money and especially from the old people from our LED so 2017 the Bundestags war in 2017 is a special case if we consider it compared to other parties so now having this situation where we find that it's it's something that basically never happened in recent history in Germany before in terms of what made people decide at the polls we wondered, okay, well is there a way to more accurately measure this demand side of things this need for information for voters and what better way there is to measure the salians in the population than to look at Google queries so we collected Google trends data more specifically the Google searches and refugees, Flüchtlinge general term and again here's this way to even out a trend line this is the daily change in how this topic developed and if we put our daily change of AFT mentions over that we do see that there's something there there's some sort of systematic relationship and then crunching these numbers and putting them again through a vector order regression model we come to the conclusion that with a lag of only one day Google searches for refugees actually lead AFT mentions in the media so if on Tuesday a higher number of people in Germany Googled refugees on Wednesday the AFT was mentioned more often than the day before the end effect wasn't big but it was there and it was significant we also of course considered the alternative and the magic word is here it's granger causality so you can actually calculate and reliably calculate that the temporal succession means that one follows the other and so all of a sudden it becomes a bit difficult to point the fingers at the media because if the media just reacts to an interest it operates like a business if we like it or not there's the normative idea of the media especially in a country that is rich in high quality publications as is Germany that the media is a public good that educates people and brings out the best in them in challenging them and persuading them of the best side of the argument but at the end of the day in the online world it is a business with a measurable outcome you have clicks you have trackers you have ad durations that you can measure and so you can see which articles are favorite and which articles people people last the longest on and we're not saying this important important distinction to make here we're not saying that there's a direct causal link between people googling refugees and the media directly reacts to that prompt because there's some search engine optimization guy or girl every media publishing house that monitors what people are interested in we're saying that there's an intermediate step there it's not a direct cause it's just a sort of delay that is in there that allows for other mechanisms to get in so we're wondering what about the consumer focusing on the demand side and in 2017 there's a few things that you could actually look at to gauge what the demand side demands and we decided to focus on Twitter because without actually knowing this when we first started out with collecting all this data we decided to set up yeah to set up a Twitter scraper and that way between September 1st and September 24th we collected 4.5 million tweets that contained keywords that contained any one of a list of keywords that had that had political connotation so looking at this body of data we can extract things like the top 200 most used hashtags and if we do that and we count the tweets that contains one of the top 200 hashtags and we pay special attention to which one of these hashtags are decidedly pro AFD we get to a number that 30.9% of the tweets that contained any of those top 200 hashtags actually contain one that is in favor of the AFD whereas if we count the decidedly no AFD the anti AFD, no AFD in all ways of spelling and capitalization and so forth that's only 1.2% and here where it becomes here where it becomes a bit ticklish so in order to sort of give a better idea of what role Twitter might have played in our little relationship here between the demand side and the supply side the supply side supplying the news we have a beautiful network graph so this is a retweeting network this is we extract all the mentions of an actor each dot is a Twitter user each line is five or more retweets retweets, we're aware of that retweets don't automatically mean endorsement you might retweet something that is outlandish and crazy but for the sake of visualizing what the weights are on Twitter we're treating them as the same and anyone who ever has worked with network graphs of that size they take a long time to generate and it's kind of tough to label them so I'm very proud that I was able to do so if we look at this island down there that blob, that blue blob those are accounts that cluster around AFD accounts the coloring here was done by a by a walk trap algorithm I just adjusted the colors that that algorithm used to actually match the colors in the German party landscape and so we do have a a hefty continent at the bottom right that connects all kinds of people to the AFD there if you look at the little appendix below here that is colored in brown that is mainly organized around a movement called reconquista Europe which is an even further right wing right wing movement that is sort of like directly tacked to this island of the AFD and the the connecting node is Björn Hocker which is quite interesting so we have the AFD down there you have the other parties up there the rainbow that is the pluralistic political landscape we have those two extreme points they're at the super top right and they're at the bottom left that is those are very extremely extreme Twitter user parties that's the UDP and the Freien Wähler so they don't seem to engage with the nodes that are in the center here but what's also available to note is that for the other parties, for the established parties starting from the left and orange, the pirate party, and then red, the Social Democrats, purple, Stie Linke, green, grünen yellow, FTP and black the conservative party, CDU CSU all of these parties have a central node a central a central account around which a lot of other users are fanned out so there's, for each party, there's a smaller number or a relatively small number of accounts that are highly favored in how often they are retweeted AFD doesn't have that even so this is of course a projection of something that's three-dimensional and a two-dimensional place so there might be some screwing going on here in terms of how it shows on our screen but even turning it and trying to identify which party is at the center wasn't really possible so the internal rifts and the internal power struggles they do show in how how members of the party are are retweeted also interesting to note is which nodes which users are connecting these two continents, so to speak one is that blue dot is valrecht.de, a polling aggregator of course everyone is interested in getting their polling numbers out and that's tough to see here but there's a beige a beige user in the middle there which is valrecht.de so one of the media one of the media publications that we we actually collected data on and surveyed another thing that I'm just going to mention here briefly is that that light pink colored that light pink colored insert between the greens and the central gray beige dot those are Jan Bömermann die heute show in extra 3 yeah so there's a the dynamics are are clear that we have this this party that is pretty well organized in social media and and thus is able to to dominate a media agenda that is based on algorithms basically if you think about how how the logic of information dissemination works on Twitter with trending hashtags and if you have a party that is as as I don't want to say organized but as tightly clustered around itself within itself as the AFD shows up here and there's a good good chance that that will influence what all of us get to see when we check out the the Twitter the Twitter homepage and now I know that probably a good chunk of you have a burning questions in their mind and I'm going to going to want to know so how many of these of these bright blue bob blobs are bots a Twitter bots and we try to find that out using a tool called the botometer which is something that has an API available online where you can submit it's a project from from a research team in Indiana where you can submit the name of a Twitter user and then it gives you a it runs lots of lots of analyses and analysis lots of things about this user the frequency of tweets the time at which it tweets who is who is it following who is it followed by who is it talking to that kind of stuff and but when I try to submit that I broke their API and so if if there happen to watch I apologize that was me and so it wasn't be able to do some time but there's a bunch of talks tomorrow that talk about exactly about that things I'm happy to have this sort of as a lead in for for the day tomorrow so what can we what can we take from this a bundes talks about 2017 was a perfect storm for a far right party like the AFD yet a high issues aliens of the topic that is at the center of its agenda and you have a sort of unregulated wild west of off of social media uh... we'll see how that changes uh... with with recent law changes come into effect where all of a sudden the uh... the platform itself uh... has some liability to which kind of messages are spread but if that's effective for twitters uh... as a whole uh... other bag of worms so in that sense that's why I was sort of hinting at in in this issue environment we have people be interested in the topic that is central uh... for the party like the AFD is the media they have pretty surprisingly uh... uh... surprisingly predictable uh... and did not have at least for the for the topics before the for the for the publications that we covered uh... it did so uh... and it and for the context of where we're arguing here in uh... that's the AFD only gets like twenty percent of the share towards the end of the campaign is something that is a little bit surprising and that also leads into uh... into a different question of uh... what does this oh it's the journalist's fault actually mean what does it really mean this sort of is based on this normative expectation of the media being an impartial uh... an impartial uh... deliver of information uh... and if you think about what else is going on on the internet with alternative media and alternative news fear establishing itself uh... with news blogs like uh... well i don't wanna uh... i don't wanna call any names because as well as there's a there's a sort of scene of far right fringe blogs in in germany that we also collected uh... and so we're uh... further down the line we're gonna look at what the topics where they were covered in that uh... and how that connected to uh... to influencing public opinion uh... in in germany but having said this with these alternative ways of getting your news information uh... being available if you have the press if you have the mainstream press not covering a party like the aft to a certain extent you only give the fodder to those cries of lügenpresse uh... mandate mendacious press uh... in members of the of of the population that are sort of uh... at the risk of being lost as audience members so it's it's kind of difficult to call it to call the shots here and actually point the fingers at the media because they they delivered informing on an interest that existed in the pot in the population before they reported on something like the aft and with this i want to leave it at that i think you're very much for your attention uh... and i uh... i'm highly highly eager to hear uh... questions and prompts and ideas how we could pursue this feel free to attend microphones even the microphone i don't see behind the cameras let's start with number two should make some sound thank you thank you very much for your amazing work uh... i've got only one question do you plan on releasing those those collected data and what license uh... and that's a question that we uh... that we asked ourselves to uh... we would love to collect the data and ultimately it will happen when we have to make sure that we actually have the right to do so with the way that we collected it but we're definitely looking into that okay number five yeah you hello this is working uh... it's something i'm from the netherlands to compare these experiences with the aft with the experience in the netherlands you know we had wilders we had for donk we had for town uh... now we have both there and it seems that there is a major difference between the aft day because i presently i frankly i don't know the name of the leader of the aft it used to be frofoc pitri and now i don't know but the in the netherlands the leaders of the uh... those populist uh... right-wing parties they were they were very good in manipulating the media they were sending out messages is sending a kelder in germany what's the word like uh... the pro provocating is sending out provocations and that attracted attention of the media so there are people saying that you shouldn't react on all provocations anyway they were geared to draw attention and i wonder whether aft has been to the same extent active in the field of drawing attention purposely using even uh... uh... agencies that are specialized in advertising um... great question uh... there is this idea that the aft was very skillful at uh... sort of insinating scandal and and purposely doing things on a public stage that would draw attention to them uh... for example this uh... this uh... yeah i say it again this uh... uh... this uh... expression by alexander gaulan to dispose of a german politician uh... or uh... the other uh... leading candidate alice vital leaving a talk show uh... while it was being uh... broadcast um... so there is uh... there definitely is this is this element of the of actually taking a scandal and using it for your own for pushing your own agenda uh... whereas if they used uh... ad agencies for the media campaign uh... they did their campaigning was highly professionalized um... in terms of what their uh... uh... their posters were and how their campaign ads were worked uh... and they did work with a company that also was involved with donald trump's campaign uh... but uh... in terms of new media or online media it's not not that new anymore in terms of what they did on online media i mean i just only have an anecdotal sense if they use something like bots uh... which is also a way of uh... of buying uh... buying attention uh... i can i can sort of tell you about one specific case where we investigated which twitter users were the most active in tweeting on the aft on german twitter is tomorrow is a talk about a twitter user called ballerina which is um... which a name that has been out there which there's great indication that that is definitely a bot that has been planted and has been controlled by someone else uh... by uh... by sort of uh... by any group of actors that is not actually a ballerina uh... what we found was a twitter user called taylor tubby zero zero seven that tweeted in those three weeks that we surveyed six thousand five hundred times and mostly just retweeted uh... retweeted calls to go and cast your ballot that were all put out by the central aft accounts uh... and it didn't have a lot of followers like something five hundred or so but it just kept retweeting over and over and over and over and when we actually wanted to check out the page of that bot it was deleted the user was deleted uh... so there's a chance of your question um... this this high degree of personalization that's uh... the the patai for the friites has in the Netherlands is not as extreme and for the aft in germany because there's more leading candidates and there's internal rifts like it get rid of this is basically his own party uh... that's not the the same the strategy to use scandal to use something that is outrageous and push the boundaries a little bit more than jump back and say oh no we did not mean that at all in this way that is the exact same spot on strategy that is that perhaps i should add that bill was made it like many people queuing okay then i'll then i'll stop okay thank you we have questions from the internet then yes and qtg is asking why do you come to the conclusion that this was a special election while the last election austria has exactly the same issues don't you see this as some sort of an global effect uh... that's true a syrian uh... civil war that pushes people to flee from from war and save the livelihood is something that is not only felt in germany for the context of germany it's a special action that's this sort of situation is never uh... has never occurred in this way before but absolutely each election in europe basically since two thousand fifteen uh... was a special action in that sense but not in terms of the outcomes in a way that because foreign parties in other european countries already had uh... at their foot in the door and especially in austria where with the f uh... fpv were pretty well established with previously having been part uh... part of the government and now being part of the government again but for germany uh... in in what the issues were that were top of people's minds that's the special case that i meant okay microphone number three please thank you uh... first uh... i really appreciate the uh... sincerity and transparency of your talk thank you very much we need more of this in such circumstances and maybe less polemics sometimes um... there's just a little trifle in your method uh... where i was wondering how did you filter the linke and glüner stuff did you uh... did you yeah how exactly did you do it did you maybe count uh... all the dimensions of glüner uh... with the capital and non-capital g and linke with uh... capital l and non-capital and then filter it out further what did you do it uh... the other way around i know that you focus specifically on the aft stuff and uh... maybe you were focused on representing all the parties that might be relevant but uh... i would still be interested in that part thanks that's uh... uh... a great question um... the thing is that we used when we actually put all that would have to be collected text before we put it through the the unloading methods uh... we put it all into lower case just so we could have a consistent uh... way of analyzing um... and with capitalization sometimes it just trips up the way to treat this and that's why you ran through these issues with linke and glüner where we had to resort to only uh... taking basically the candidate's names and then also linke partai and grüner partai and a few conjugations so uh... dear linke partai right grammatically the cases we only like we conjugated them through uh... but yeah we since our focus was on the aft we weren't uh... we weren't especially concerned with that which is unfortunate i admit that uh... but for the purpose of this talk we decided to just use this to work around okay thanks microphone six please hello thanks for your interesting uh... presentation i'm wondering if you and your team uh... so you you looked at mentions of the different parties but i'm wondering if you looked at the content of the articles and how they talked about it if they were talked about positively or negatively thank you very much it's a great question that we actually did consider answer this question with a counter question as social scientists like to do uh... anyone in this room use amazon mechanical turk and works on hits to earn a few cents here and there no okay so i can speak freely there's a there's a method that uses uh... cheap labor on amazon mechanical turk and presents each worker with two sentences out of which they have to change the one that is more positive and and so we want to use this to train uh... a machine learning algorithm to actually get away to gauge the sentiment of positive and negative in the text that we had collected uh... we started that in early december and we we had a a workbook with four thousand so-called hits four thousand little jobs four thousand comparisons uh... and when this job was done uh... five or six days later uh... we we sort of put that through a test and compared it with our own hand coding that we had done um... and it turned out that one worker on amazon mechanical turk spent uh... over seven hours and worked of those four thousand little jobs that we had he worked three thousand nine hundred and eighty uh... and over one thousand four hundred of which he did in less than two seconds which is unfortunate because a this person uh... this person right person question mark probably used a script probably use the bot or just randomly clicked uh... the coding didn't match up at all with what we did hand-wise ourselves uh... uh... and that really screwed up our uh... our approach there uh... if any of you plan on uh... on doing some hits in the new year for amazon mechanical turk and you're asked to compare uh... two sentences that mention a political actor in germany uh... you can send me an email and maybe a screenshot and tell me how much you appreciate that we're paying six cents for each for each comparison uh... but that's uh... that's the story what we haven't we don't have any sentiment uh... in this analysis here in this context i'm very much a ghost of christmas future in your twitter data where you take retweets as well do you determine what are quotes and what are direct retweets because uh... in my experience and i work with this and then mark and in the u k a lot of people like to distance themselves from what the aft and similar saying by quoting everything they're saying and giving them the press uh... that's a very good point to make we did not make any any distinction between quotes and retweets but we did filter uh... based on five retweets by thinking okay if you occasionally uh... feel like you have to point something out that is outrageous and ridiculous that a person uh... uh... a member of a party says on twitter um... you would be inclined to do so less than a certain amount of time we also try to with other cutoffs the graph basically always look the same but if we think about what this means for for how the demand side is influenced it doesn't matter basically if if you're retweeting out of endorsement or out of uh... out of out of spite that's right uh... that's uh... that's the logic why we decided to to use mentions and retweets another question from the internet yes and new twenty threes asking do you think that the window of commonly acceptable ideas the so-called overtone window was shifted to the right uh... by the ideas of the aft echoed in the media uh... that's a good question that's a good question uh... something that comes to mind is that media uses epi-phenomenal uh... your sort of likely but the question is like do you think uh... does something happen in you because you use a certain media outlet or uh... do you use a certain media outlet because something happened in you uh... from the sense that i got uh... i would say that the the degree to what is what is acceptable definitely was shifted over the course of this campaign that all of a sudden we're questioning if remembering the holocaust should be uh... should be something that is uh... at the heart or very close to german identity that's something that uh... a political scientist would have never expected that this cleavage can be opened up again in a in a in a way that is so uh... so potent as it as it did now so it definitely did something to uh... to the overall discourse uh... in germany uh... whereas that is an effect of uh... of media reporting on the aft uh... would require us to use something like this the sentiment analysis to actually determine determine how the media talked about which aspect of uh... of the aft agendas i can see some movement behind microphone number eight i'm sorry i thank you very much uh... thank you for your work i still do have a critical question basically the things you showed is something like we all know yeah we could see this happening last year and so i mean this year in the last election so i'm wondering now whether the method you used which was basically focusing on quantity uh... is in a sort of mirroring what was happening and i'm wondering if you would work keep working on it all like you you used buzzwords and you use the media instead of like narrowing it down or more using most specific specific uh... questions and i was wondering if you have this with these results now and you have proof for them what are your next questions and how can you continue to use these uh... these this that the data you have to make it more specific so we can really have some outcome and some conclusions coming from this uh... it's an absolutely wonderful question um... of course we we thought about using this data further down the line uh... we our initial plan was to connect this uh... not just with salience data that we that we derive from google searches we also have uh... have facebook data that we collected that we want to look into but there it's a bit challenging to um... to actually uh... analyze uh... comments in depth onto language because language see uh... tends to be way more fluid and you have certain problems with uh... with selection and self-selection uh... so you really really have to be careful to cross connect which person that comments on facebook uh... is the same person and thus if you only do quantitative stuff uh... would would appear disproportionately uh... as i mentioned we have also collected data from from far right blocks from news blogs uh... that uh... that very actively endorsed the aft and their topics uh... and so we're planning to pull this into the analysis along with uh... data from the german longitudinal election study where uh... in this time frame that we serve it in the data each day uh... one hundred people in germany were called up and asked uh... about their feelings towards specific parties mention uh... actors so we actually have day by day uh... data once it comes out on uh... on how people what people thought about uh... those actors so we're planning to pull that in as a more reliable uh... measure for salience thank you very much i'm very sorry about times up so there will be no more questions right now in front of the audience alexander byer thank you very much a warm applause