Politicians’ and Journalists’ Tweets in the 2021 German Federal ELection

The next session at AoIR 2022 is a panel on the social media activities around the recent German and Australian elections that I helped put together, and we start with two papers on the 2021 German election. The first is by Nina Fabiola Schumacher and Christian Nuernbergk, and Nina notes that the 2021 election was significantly dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and that social media played an especially important role during the election, therefore. Twitter, in particular, has come to play an especially important role in political debate and journalistic practice, as part of a wider hybrid media environment. But it remains unknown how election uses of Twitter differ from non-election uses, and how specific groups like journalists and politicians use the platform in Germany.

The focus of this paper is especially on the personalisation of political discourse, shifting away from party campaigns and towards personal campaigning. There is no clear trend here, however: the personalisation of media coverage and social media activity is often related to a number of other factors, and especially to key events like TV debates. How do journalists apply personalisation patterns in their campaign reporting tweets? How are leading candidates evaluated in journalistic election coverage? Equally, how do candidates seek to enhance their visibility in media coverage, and what role does self-personalisation play in this context?

This study evaluates the Twitter activity patterns of both journalists and candidates in the German election, building on a sample of tweets by political journalists and political candidates. It distinguishes pre-campaign and campaign timeframes, and coded a random sample of tweets for the presence of certain themes and topics. Unsurprisingly, TV debates caused particular spikes in activity, while several non-campaign events such as the military withdrawal from Afghanistan also caused substantial spikes.

Commercial journalists became especially engaged in tweeting during the campaign; public service media journalists were considerably more stable in their tweeting patterns. #Afghanistan and #Kabul were prominent hashtags, and foreign policy became a major topic during the campaign period. This was at the expense of economic and health policy topics during the campaign period. But many tweets did not specifically thematise policy fields, and were instead more generally about the election overall. Evaluative tweets were more prominent amongst MPs, with particular focus on questions of competence; this was especially pronounced for tweets by the election winner and new Chancellor, Olaf Scholz. In journalists’ tweets, questions of credibility were especially focussed on Greens co-leader Annalena Baerbock.

In the network, the leading candidates received the greatest focus during the campaign period, unsurprisingly; this was a shift from the broader distribution of focus during the pre-campaign period. News media were also centrally located in these networks, of course, and this seems to dominate the increasing importance of Twitter as a news medium.