Neurechts in Daten

Year: 2019
Context: Project work
Role: Data Mining, Visualization Design & Development
Tools: Python, Plotly.js, React

fig.1A europe map highlighting important events connecting the beginning, rise and actions of the Identitarian Movement before it was banned.

01 — Premise

Neu-Rechts in Daten is an interactive data visualization project about the German-speaking New Right on Twitter. The movement has only a few tens of thousands of sympathizers, but its coordinated online activism shapes political debate well beyond its size. To make that visible, we analyzed about 540,000 tweets from 800 accounts in the scene and compared them with an equally sized neutral group. The resulting website lets readers explore the network themselves and draw their own conclusions. It captures the scene at its most visible, from late 2019 to early 2020, just before Twitter deleted many of its central accounts.

Supporters of the Identitarian Movement at a demonstration. — fig.2Supporters of the Identitarian Movement. Source: FAZ ↗

10New Right Root Accounts

800New Right Accounts in the Network

540.000New Right Tweets

02 — Analysis

We manually selected ten central accounts of the New Right, including key activists, publishers and magazines, and used the Twitter API to collect their more than 100,000 unique followers. A stratified random sample drew equal numbers from each account’s followers, giving 800 accounts for the analysis. A neutral comparison group of the same size was built the same way from ten mainstream accounts in news, politics, entertainment and sport. For every account, we collected up to its 3,200 most recent tweets, about one million in total. We then compared the two groups by tweet type, word frequency, time of day, follower ratios and who interacts with whom.

Network graph of followers and followings radiating from a central account, from the ‘Reichweite’ view of the Metriken section. — fig.3Metrics – Reach: followers and followings of the analysed accounts, switchable between the neutral and the new-right dataset.

Word cloud of the most frequently used words, with neutral and new-right terms in different colours. — fig.4Metrics – Language: the most frequently used words, comparing the neutral and the new-right datasets.

Map of Central Europe with a timeline of events and an info panel on Vienna as the centre of the movement. — fig.5Map: a timeline of key events from Poitiers in 2012 to Leipzig in 2018, with Vienna as the centre of the movement.

3D network of interactions centred on the account Martin_Sellner, with an options panel. — fig.6Interactions: a 3D network of the source accounts and the accounts they interacted with.

03 — Result

Muted blues, greys and reds were chosen to avoid any political association, while angular shapes and typefaces reflect the uncomfortable subject. Interaction is central: readers can explore 3D tweet plots and network graphs, highlight connections between users, and switch between the New Right and neutral datasets to draw their own comparisons.

In Germany, the Identitarian Movement has been classified as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution since 2019.

The project later served as a case study in data journalism and led to a lecture on data mining, analysis and visualization.

View Project ↗

Next Project

Overtourism in Palau →