The second speaker in this session at the Weizenbaum Conference is Julian Maitra, whose focus is on the German far-right’s plans for ‘remigration’: the forced expulsion of legal migrants from Germany. Notably, that term is now also used by the Trump administration as it plans its own mass deportations of residents from the US.
Ideas surrounding such remigration rhetoric connect affective publics and affective polarisation with cumulative racism, platforms racism, and digital populism. Julian explored these debates by gathering public social media posts from Facebook and Instagram on this concept, and is interested how they evolved over time. There were more posts on Facebook than Instagram, but more interactions on Instagram than Facebook – but more comments again on Facebook. Post texts were often quite long, perhaps surprisingly.
Overall posting activity was limited at first but kicked off especially after the publication of a story by the critical journalism outlet Correctiv, which covered a secret far-right meeting about their remigration agenda; top accounts were largely related to the AfD and other far-right groups, though some antiracist groups were also active.
Engagement on Instagram was mostly with non-right-wing actors (including news outlets), while on Facebook the far-right actors attracted most engagement. For both platforms, a hashtag network shows some clear distinctions between pro- and anti-AfD groups. The sentiment of posts was stably negative.
