Hijacking Solidarity. Affective Networking of Far-Right Publics on Twitter
Makhashvili, Ana – 2024
In February 2020, thousands of refugees were met with massive border police violence at the Turkish-Greek border after Erdoğan opened the borders to the European Union. As images displaying this violence started circulating, Twitter users in Germany mobilized a network of solidarity using the hashtag #WirhabenPlatz (“we have space”). The hashtag was almost immediately hijacked by far-right actors to contest the claims of solidarity and mobilize nativist sentiments. Combining methods of network and text analysis, this chapter aims to understand how far-right publics hijacked this hashtag-public by engaging in affective media practices. Network analysis reveals that far-right users managed to mobilize the largest and loudest community in the network. Hashtag co-occurrence analysis shows how they subverted the hashtag’s original meaning to spread nativist sentiments and transformed this public into a site of contested sentiments. Qualitative text analysis exemplifies how the practice of hijacking invites irony, sarcasm, and mockery—also fostered by Twitter’s affordances—rather than expression of explicit emotions. Finally, the study outlines how far-right actors engage in these practices to construct a nativist “We” under threat and perform counterpublicness as a tension with the general public, which situates them in a state of marginalization and victimhood.