From solidarity to blame game: A computational approach to comparing far-right and general public Twitter discourse in the aftermath of the Hanau terror attack

Zentrale Fragestellung:

Which themes distinguished the general and the far-right online discourse in the aftermath of the Hanau terror attack? 1) Since research has shown that more extreme accounts have a stronger coher- ence in the sense that their network is more closely connected (Mathew et al., 2019), we aim to inspect whether the far-right community discusses different topics than the general, unspecified discourse. Specifically, we focus on differ- ences in information sharing behaviour and theme proportions, but also whether there are interactions in terms of counter-argumentation. 2) To investigate whether a right-wing extremist terrorist attack resulted in sim- ilar discourses, as was demonstrated for communication following Islamist terror attacks (Fischer-Preßler et al., 2019), we examine to what extent the topics of solidarity, search for meaning hostility, and responsibility attribution also appear in the Twitter communication after the Hanau attack. 3) As a relevant piece of information about the assessment of this attack entered the discourse only four weeks later, we seek to explore whether the discourse persists from a longer-term perspective and how the development of topics over time and between groups differ over time.