Linguist Dr Sascha Michel on social media during election campaigns. Dr Sascha Michel did his doctorate on the communication of politicians using the example of Twitter (now X). The 43-year-old comes from Rhineland-Palatinate, studied in Mainz and completed his doctorate in Koblenz. After working in Basel, Düsseldorf and Erfurt, he has been a research assistant at the Institute of Linguistics and Communication Science at RWTH Aachen University since 2020.
Aachen/Germany, February 10, 2025 Question: The election campaign is already all about exaggerated messages. Is this escalation even more pronounced in social media?
Dr Sascha Michel: Interestingly, not necessarily. Together with a colleague, I analysed the Instagram account of the Green Party more closely during the last parliamentary election campaign. It’s very much about argumentation. The posts are not just snippets, but sometimes highly complex arguments. Social media does not automatically mean a flattening of the political message. Even since the character limit was dropped on X, I have noticed that some of the arguments there are complex.
Question: How does this go hand in hand with the proven short attention span of the vast majority of users?
Michel: The most important things on Instagram are very condensed – in a picture and usually in a concise statement. The core message is conveyed directly, just like on an election poster. In most cases, however, this core message is accompanied by intensive and long texts. It is an option.
Question: Do radical parties have it easier? Because they offer supposedly simple answers?
Michel: People like to insinuate that the AfD is so successful on social networks. If you compare their presence with that of the Greens, for example, the AfD is perhaps a little more polarising, but the Greens do it in a very similar way. The Greens, but also the Left and the SPD, have been running a purely polarised election campaign for days: Merz versus ‘We’. Breaking your word against keeping your word.
Question: It is also always said that TikTok is easier for the AfD…
Michel: It’s interesting to see why the AfD is so successful on TikTok. One reason is the party’s direct and youth-orientated communication. Some AfD players are very good at this ‘influencer behaviour’ that we know from Instagram, which allows them to convey their message: I am one of you, I am close to you, I care. On the other hand, this approachable communication is rewarded by the algorithm, which means that AfD messages reach young people much more frequently, creating a familiarisation effect. Not only, but also through TikTok, a different kind of political normality has emerged among young people. There is no longer the classic centre and the fringes on the right and left. This has changed; for many young people, the fringes have become the centre because the distinction between politicians and influencers has become blurred. This is one of the reasons why young people are easier to ‘catch’ than adults.
Question: That would also explain the AfD’s success with first-time voters.
Michel: Absolutely. Young first-time voters are now largely politically influenced by social media. This is very well demonstrated by the data from the last state elections in Saxony and Thuringia.
Question: So it’s about presence, not political content?
Michel: To a large extent, but politicians still express themselves on X, for example. I can’t remember an article in a newspaper that said ‘…the minister said in a TikTok video’.
Question: Is X still relevant for political content?
Michel: Yes, especially when it comes to current affairs and topics that need to be taken up quickly. This is the only place where politicians can reach the media very quickly. No other platform can replace X because the journalists are all there. There have been isolated migrations from politics to Mastodon or Bluesky. But the majority of the media have not migrated with them. They all berate Elon Musk, but they stay with X anyway. And they even come back to X, as Robert Habeck proves, who left a few years ago in protest and rejoined just in time for the election campaign.
Question: Is it possible to say with any degree of certainty what influence social media has on elections?
Michel: It is almost impossible to draw conclusions from likes to votes. However, it is quite possible to try and identify trends, to see how coherently the parties act on social networks, how many supporters they have and whether they succeed in mobilising them. We can therefore recognise rough tendencies.
Question: How does election campaigning work on social media?
Michel: Consistency and coherence are important – reactivating the X account or going to TikTok just for the election campaign is not very authentic. It is essential to understand the influencing forces of the platforms. Instagram has a completely different influencing force – you could also call it ‘its own logic’ in inverted commas – than X, and the two work differently to TikTok. Of course, there are completely different target groups, but there is also a style that has developed on each platform.
Question: What does this style look like on Instagram, for example?
Michel: Questions are incorporated, the community is involved, it’s about close-up language, certain narratives and a certain framing, insights into private life are given and communication can sometimes be tongue-in-cheek. The parties have more or less all adopted this; the CDU, for example, is using Instagram very much in this style in this election campaign, including the use of emojis and addressing followers as ‘Du’. This style would be more likely to be used by X, for example.
Question: So there is hardly any content that is played out in the same way on all platforms anymore?
Michel: Exactly. Neither the parties nor individual politicians do this exclusively. Politicians also act in different roles on different networks. On Facebook, for example, it’s more the role of the MP, where posts are made that are of interest to the constituency. On X, on the other hand, it is the functional role, i.e. they post as a minister, committee member or, for example, inclusion officer or consumer protection officer. Instagram is somewhat more open, where politicians can also communicate more frequently in the identity role. They can present themselves as animal lovers, give insights into their family life or post holiday pictures, i.e. show different facets of their personality. Some politicians‘ dogs even have their own Instagram account.
Question: Who in politics is best at this?
Michel: Almost all of them are very professionalised when it comes to social media. Not only do they master it, but they also manage to get people talking about it on social media time and time again. A good example is #söderisst – most people will recognise the hashtag.
Question: The more bizarre the message, the greater the attention?
Michel: That’s the way it is, but there’s always a risk that you’ll get yourself in trouble – for example, does a German chancellor have to show off his briefcase on TikTok? Or it can be exaggerated and a post backfires – as recently happened to Karl Lauterbach when he mixed Auschwitz Remembrance Day with his criticism of Friedrich Merz and the AfD in a tweet. The danger of social networks for politicians is that they can go too far. And on the other hand, anything can be scandalised and depending on who then jumps on this spiral of scandalisation, things can become difficult. Julia Klöckner was once accused of having described the Hitler salute as a free expression of opinion in an interview – which she had not done. This was initially fabricated by lesser-known users, but then taken up by political opponents and finally several media outlets jumped on the bandwagon and suddenly Mrs Klöckner had to clarify something she had never said.
Question: What role do paid adverts play?
Michel: We know from the last state election campaign in Hesse that adverts or ads are placed thematically, so that, for example, political election adverts on the topic of ‘housing’ appeared on the ImmoScout24 website. This individualisation of political advertising, which is supposedly subtle, is also likely to play a major role in this election campaign.
Question: Getting noticed by the media is always about speed…
Michel: …and that harbours the danger of posting ‘from the hip’. Social media have made communication faster. Politicians have to constantly deliver, want to use all platforms and still do justice to the respective ‘influencing power’, the logic of the platform – that harbours dangers. There is also the risk of political communication being trivialised – as with Olaf Scholz’s briefcase. It remains a balancing act.
Further Information:
Theorie und Fallanalysen zur Kommunikation von Politiker*innen am Beispiel von Twitter, (https://www.peterlang.com/document/1294531)
ImageSource
Gerd Altmann auf Pixabay