OUTRAGE, SOLIDARITY, COUNTERATTACK: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF TWEETS ON TWO POLITICAL SCANDALS IN GERMANY

Abstract

The prevalence of politicians’ scandals on social media has become an integral part of contemporary political life, presenting a challenge to existing scandal research. The formerly passive audience is given new opportunities for participation that have not yet been comprehensively described either theoretically or empirically. This study contributes to filling this gap by developing a taxonomy to describe offensive and defensive forms of audience participation during scandals. I analyze a sample of 500 influential tweets, taken from a corpus of more than 55.000 tweets related to two scandalizations of German politicians. The proposed taxonomy is shown to be suitable for describing both offensive and defensive forms of audience participation in scandalizations on social media.