Linked Resources in Debates About the German Network Enforcement Act on Twitter

Abstract

This paper analyses linked resources in debates about the German Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG) on Twitter. Public discourse about this law has been contentious in Germany and abroad with opponents of it cautioning against overblocking and threats of censorship, while supporters highlighted the necessity to hold platforms accountable for illegal content to protect minorities and eventually the democratic public sphere. The conversation on Twitter provides valuable insights into the stakeholders, topics, and communicative practices that shaped this discussion about platform regulation and free speech, which has substantially impacted the European digital policy agenda, eventually culminating in the Digital Services Act (DSA). We first collected tweets mentioning NetzDG and produced a network graph to visualise the interaction between accounts that took part in these debates based on their retweet activity. Then, we extracted every URL inserted in the tweets collected to understand what resources those accounts refer to. Findings revealed that accounts linked to the German right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) tend to share links to so-called alternative online media sites and reference content of AfD politicians on other social media platforms (Eg.: Youtube and Facebook). The cluster composed of liberal tech, media, and legal experts, however, tends to reference specialized IT blogs and websites, while the cluster composed of accounts related to the German liberal Party (FDP) primarily linked content of the legacy media. These findings allow us to identify the informational resources and media that have had the greatest impact on the NetzDG discussion on Twitter through their relevance for the groups represented by the individual network clusters. Furthermore, they shed light on the ways in which this highly technical and juridical expert discourse concerning the regulation of speech online is translated for a discussion in broader society.