Chris Liebold
Although additional social "pigeonholing" in social media could be detrimental to the German democratic public, little research has been conducted on the stereotyping of East Germans in social media. Using a combination of computer-assisted text analysis and manual content analysis of N = 106,616, Maximilian Zehring and Prof. Emese Domahidi, in the department's latest publication, have investigated to which sector of society the stereotypes apply, what kind of threat East Germans are described as, and exactly what stereotypes exist. They show that stereotypical tweets about East Germans are relatively rare. East Germans are portrayed as a general political threat and right-wing attitudes, socioeconomic marginalization, and negative behaviors are attributed to them. The contextual stereotypes we found are consistent with previous studies that examined traditional media. The stereotypes we found suggest that different groups, such as Saxons, are recurrent targets of political stereotypes depending on current events. For more information, please feel free to read the publication:
Zehring, M., & Domahidi, E. (2022). Thirty Years After the German Reunification-Exploring Stereotypes About East Germans on Twitter. International Journal Of Communication, 16, 21. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/19010/3868