BMBF Grant: FOCUS (Financial Insecurity, Economic Education, and the Spread of Antisemitic Conspiracy Narratives in Digital Spaces)
Grant 01BA2502
Principal Investigator
Prof. Dr. Nina Kolleck (University of Potsdam)
Tel.: (0331) 977 21 76
E-Mail: kasprzok@uni-potsdam.de
Research Associates
Dr. Keith Goldstein
Project description
Antisemitism in Germany was long portrayed as a historical problem; however, in recent years antisemitic narratives have increasingly circulated, particularly on social media. In contemporary digital publics, antisemitism often appears in coded forms that avoid explicit references to Jews and instead draw on economic and financial stereotypes. The aim of this project is to understand how economically coded antisemitic conspiracy narratives emerge, spread, and gain resonance. We identify latent themes and sub-themes in antisemitic discourse on social media, determine common codes, and analyze comments as well as the reach and popularity of antisemitic content.
FOCUS combines two empirical components: 1) population-level survey data and 2) public social media content. The first part of our study examines the opinions of a nationally representative sample of over 2,000 German citizens about their conspiratorial thoughts about Jews and related opinions in a survey. We examine both individual factors (e.g. socio-economic status, education, age, gender, etc.) as well as multilevel settings, such as the impact of coming from a rural versus an urban community. The second part of our study examines TikTok videos that display antisemitic narratives. By means of the official API, we collect TikTok videos that include discussions of Jews, Israel, and Zionism. We then examine the videos to uncover whether the content might be antisemitic in nature. The videos are analyzed with Natural Language Processing, a computational linguistic analysis that quantitatively determine sentiments and topics.
Our project starts with the hypothesis that economic insecurity, perceived injustice, and uncertainty about the future can increase receptivity to antisemitic conspiracies. At the same time, we also presume that economic education functions as a protective factor by enabling individuals to resist simplified blame narratives. FOCUS aims to explain not only who is susceptible to adopt and distribute economically coded antisemitic narratives, but also why certain narratives achieve high visibility and engagement in digital spaces.