Program: We are welcoming Marcus Bösch and Wyn Brodersen to our context collapse series. Marcus Bösch works as a research assistant in the HybriD research project on disinformation at HAW Hamburg and is doing his doctorate on TikTok & Propaganda at the University of Münster. He publishes the leading subscriber newsletter, „Understanding TikTok“ (http://understanding-tiktok.com/). Marcus will present his current work on Thirst Trap Propaganda in Military Image Wars on TikTok as demonstrated by female Israeli soldiers posting videos on their private TikTok accounts, where they dance featuring assault rifles as dance props.

Wyn Brodersen is a sociologist and researcher at the German Federal Association for Countering Online Hate (bag-gegen-hass.net). He is working on digital subcultures, right-wing terrorism, and their intersections. His presentation will focus on memes, which have become an important propaganda tool for right-wing extremists. In a recent study, Wyn and his colleagues examine how these groups use memes on Telegram to spread hate and inequality. By combining computational methods and manual annotation, they analyze various hate categories and their visual communication. Using a large dataset, the study identifies the argumentative motives, aesthetic styles, and rhetoric employed by different groups in their meme-based communication.

Date and time: June 13, at 7 p.m. The official part of the event normally takes around two hours and will be followed by some informal drinks.

Location: We are meeting at the Leibniz-Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut, Rothenbaumchaussee 36, 20148 Hamburg.

Registration: If you cannot attend, but want to be informed about upcoming events in the next months, please join our DFN mailing list!

Call for contributions: Can you see yourself providing a short input as a basis for discussion? The success of the format is dependent on your contributions, and we are looking forward to your thoughts, insights, and perspectives!