Playing with Fire: How the interplay between the Dutch House of Representatives and social media fuels rage

Jeroen Bakker; B.A. de Graaf; Sander Prins; Mirko Schaefer; Daan van der Weijden

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Research report · Report · 2024

Playing with Fire: How the interplay between the Dutch House of Representatives and social media fuels rage

Jeroen Bakker, B.A. de Graaf, Sander Prins, Mirko Schaefer, Daan van der Weijden

Utrecht University, 2024

Abstract

A research report (Utrecht University / Data School) analysing nearly 50 million messages on Twitter and Telegram to examine the dynamics between political debate in the Dutch House of Representatives and the reactions, comments, and framing it provokes on social media. A central focus is tracking how threatening and radicalising language moves between parliamentary politics and online platforms.

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In short

Debate in the Dutch parliament and talk on social media feed each other. Hostile words from fringe online groups, such as "tribunals" and "witch", spread widely on Twitter once MPs used them in parliament, and soon became normal. Telegram carried far more conspiracy theories and threats than Twitter.

Key findings

After Dutch MP Pepijn van Houwelingen told a fellow MP in a November 2021 parliamentary debate that "there will be tribunals", Dutch political tweets using the word "tribunals" rose from 659 in the entire preceding period to more than 38,000 afterwards; the term had already been circulating in QAnon-inspired Telegram groups.
Hostile terms aimed at Dutch politicians, such as "tribunals" and "witch" (used by Geert Wilders for Sigrid Kaag), first caused an outcry on Twitter and then became a regular part of the language directed at politicians.
In a manually annotated random sample of 5,000 messages per platform, 276 Dutch political Telegram messages contained dehumanising, demonising or threatening language, compared with 167 on Twitter; death threats were rare on Twitter but not on Telegram.
Explicit elite conspiracy theories appeared in 715 of 5,000 sampled Dutch political Telegram messages (more than 14%), against roughly 205 of 5,000 on Twitter.

A weekly bar chart of Twitter posts containing 'tribunalen': near zero through most of 2021, a highlighted spike of 4,617 posts in mid-November 2021, then repeated peaks between 1,000 and 3,000 posts through 2022. — Figure 9 from the report: weekly number of Dutch political tweets containing 'tribunalen' (tribunals), 2021 to 2022. Almost absent before, the term peaked at 4,617 posts in the week of 14 November 2021, after MP Pepijn van Houwelingen told a fellow MP in a parliamentary debate that "there will be tribunals", and stayed in regular use afterwards.

Cite

@techreport{bakker2024playing,
  title={Playing with Fire: How the interplay between the Dutch House of Representatives and social media fuels rage},
  author={Bakker, Jeroen and de Graaf, B.A. and Prins, Sander and Schaefer, Mirko and van der Weijden, Daan},
  year={2024},
  institution={Utrecht University}
}