Study examines how Germans reckoned with racism over social media after extremist attack

Congratulations to Maria Rodriguez, PhD, assistant professor in the UB School of Social Work, and colleagues on the publication of their study, "Color-blind and racially suppressive discourses on German-speaking Twitter: A mixed method analysis of the Hanau White nationalist shootings," in the Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology.

This study examined German-speaking Twitter users' reckoning with racism in response to the right-wing extremist shootings that targeted ethnic minorities in Hanau, Germany.

We employed a mixed-methods analysis combining Structural Topic Modelling (STM) and discourse analysis. We used STM to identify broad topic patterns and focused on the topics involving the racialized commentary the German-speaking public offered in the aftermath of Hanau. The STM analysis resulted in 50 topics; among these conversations, racism in German society and racism: threats and fears were among the top 10 topics. In total, 36.8% of the 50 topics in the first month of the shootings were racism-related discussions, but the majority of these discussions did not describe the Hanau shootings as racially motivated.

We conducted a discourse analysis to capture a more fine-grained understanding of the users' racialized conversations, focusing specifically on the discursive contexts in which racially suppressive discourses were used and taking place. We identified three racially suppressive discourses, including the explanation that the shootings/shooter was mentally ill, might be racially motivated and a product of extremist groups. This study uncovered multifaceted public conversations in the aftermath of Hanau and offered interpretations of large-scale conversations that reckoned with racism on German-speaking Twitter.