https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6120-466X
ABSTRACT
Opratko’s article presents the results of a discourse-centred online ethnography, tracing the articulations of COVID-related debates against the wider backdrop of ‘cultures of rejection’ among members of online communities based in Austria. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ‘corona question’ emerged as a particularly contentious topic in Austria, both in official politics and on the level of everyday discourse. It not only reinforced accusatory attitudes towards ‘traditional’ Others, such as migrants or the unemployed, but also produced new articulations that cut across traditional left-right distinctions and new sociocultural rifts related to the acceptance or rejection of anti-pandemic measures. Finally, Opratko argues that, in COVID-related cultures of rejection, we find efforts to counter a perceived crisis of authority performatively constructing specific forms of counter-authorities, and a high level of political activity both online and offline.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit Austria in 2020, our research team had just finished the first year of the Cultures of Rejection (CuRe) research project. It quickly emerged that the pandemic’s impact on the project would be dramatic. Practically, it prevented us from proceeding with interviews, focus group discussions and ethnographic field visits that we had scheduled. We tackled this challenge by bringing forward the kind of fieldwork, originally planned for 2021, that we could undertake even under pandemic conditions and during lockdowns, namely, research in digital spaces. Even more profoundly, given the scale and severity of the crisis we were facing, we had to confront the fact that our object of study was itself being drastically and irrevocably transformed. To understand the conditions in which right-wing, authoritarian populist politics thrive, which is the ultimate goal of studying cultures of rejection, we had to acknowledge that these conditions were themselves shifting due to the pandemic and its effects. This situation presented us with an extraordinary opportunity. We could investigate the emergence of new articulations of cultures of rejection in response to the COVID crisis almost in real time. How did the COVID crisis affect the dynamics, objects and justifications of rejection? In which ways did experiences connected with the pandemic and attempts to mitigate its effects transform existing antagonisms and such diverse and disparate objects of rejection as media and politicians, migrants and minorities? Which new elements of rejection, specifically connected to the COVID crisis, have emerged or are in the process of emerging?
Before I proceed to present key characteristics of COVID-related cultures of rejection in these spaces and discuss my findings, I will briefly introduce the emerging field of scholarship to which this article aims to contribute, present the research design and methods employed, and introduce the sites in which the ethnographic fieldwork took place.
State of the art: populism and protest in the COVID-19 pandemic
All over the world, state measures introduced to combat the COVID-19 pandemic have been met with various forms of rejection, mistrust and open protest. In many countries, government responses to the pandemic have given rise to protest movements and, in some cases, new or increased social polarization. Given the relatively recent nature of these developments, the scholarly literature on these phenomena, though highly dynamic, is only just emerging. One aspect highlighted by a number of authors, mostly drawing on quantitative methods and large-n samples, is a correlation in many countries between support for right-wing populists and low compliance with anti-pandemic measures, such as the wearing of face masks, social distancing and a willingness to get vaccinated.Footnote1 Closely related contributions from the fields of media and communication studies as well as political and social sciences have analysed the emergence of a ‘pandemic populism’ spreading ‘fake news’Footnote2 and conspiracy theories.Footnote3 By building on and radicalizing strategies previously identified as ‘science-related populism’,Footnote4 pandemic populism has specifically targeted academics, scholars and public experts.Footnote5 Finally, sociologists and scholars of social movements have analysed the emergence of protest movements both on the streets and in digital spaces arising from or in tandem with pandemic populism.Footnote6 They have focused on the social and political composition of such movements,Footnote7 on the role of political entrepreneurs or ‘movement hustlers’,Footnote8 and of far-right activists,Footnote9 as well as on the digital media infrastructure used by such movements to communicate and mobilize.Footnote10
Methodology: investigating cultures of rejection in online spaces
In order to contribute to the emerging field of literature sketched above, this article presents original, in-depth ethnographic research on digital spaces where opposition to anti-pandemic measures was voiced. The analysis is based on data collected as part of the integral research strategy of the CuRe research project.Footnote11 In my investigation, I followed an approach that draws on the methodology of discourse-centred online ethnography (DCOE), which has emerged as a variant of what has been called online, digital, net or virtual ethnography.Footnote12 As developed by Jannis Androutsopolos, DCOE is based on the systematic observation of digital spaces over time. Continuous monitoring of given sites of discourse allows ‘insights into discourse practices and patterns of language use on these sites’. Its goal is ‘charting the complex architecture of [a given online] space and understanding the various relations among its components’.Footnote13
My methodological approach is based on an integrated understanding of online and offline worlds. It acknowledges their ‘intermeshing’ in everyday lives and treats offline and online environments as one ‘expanded field’ of research.Footnote14 Based on this understanding, the investigation targeted two digital spaces: first, a Facebook group bringing together residents of two districts in the eastern periphery of Vienna, which I encountered during offline research with workers in the logistics industry; second, a Telegram group that served as a space for discussion and mobilization for critics of the Austrian government’s anti-COVID measures. In each case, a prolonged virtual ethnography culminated in several weeks of intensive observation, during which postings and comments were collected systematically. This data was then analysed utilizing the software MAXQDA, which allows the systematic coding of discursive elements such as topics, antagonisms and objects of rejection, and the development of axial connections between these elements.Footnote15 This approach mirrored methods employed in the previous research phase, allowing me to draw direct comparisons to my analysis of (pre-COVID) cultures of rejection based on data generated in offline spaces. In the next section, I will introduce the two online spaces in more detail, explain the case selection and describe my field access.
Description of field sites and field access
In the first research phase of CuRe, we conducted offline interviews with employees at workplaces in the logistics industry.Footnote16 These then acted as an entry point for my online ethnography. During the interviews, one of our aims was to identify digital spaces that respondents frequented, and that they presented as relevant for their practices of sense-making in the worlds they inhabited. Once a digital space was deemed suitable to serve as an online field site based on the analysis of interview data, I could then proceed to conduct a prolonged study of that space.
The first online space that emerged as both subjectively relevant for several of our respondents in one workplace as well as pertinent to my questions regarding the emergence of new, COVID-related cultures of rejection, was the Facebook group, ‘Ich lebe auf der richtigen Seite der Donau' (I Live on the Right Side of the Danube), which had close to 20,000 members when I started to observe it in June 2020. It was mentioned early on in conversations by workers employed at a warehouse and distribution centre for an international chain of clothing stores located in one of Vienna’s outer districts east of the Danube. The group’s administrators describe the group as a space for residents of the twenty-first and twenty-second districts, the only two of Vienna’s twenty-three districts that are located on the eastern side of the Danube. The group’s name is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that, in everyday informal Viennese language, the two districts are sometimes jokingly referred to as ‘the wrong side of the Danube’, making the group’s name a geographical designation as much as a statement of local pride, appropriating and flipping a derogatory phrase directed at those living in the city’s ‘Transdanubian’ periphery. As will be described in detail in the next section, the group was clearly a site in where cultures of rejection were (re-)produced, challenged and negotiated, and where this process could be observed in a structured, systematic way. Importantly, it was not affiliated to or administrated by any organized political group, but embedded in the everyday life of people living or working in a specific area of Vienna. While their own political sympathies were quite obviously leaning towards the right, the administrators insisted on a broad ‘free speech’ policy that allowed members from various backgrounds and political sympathies to engage in heated debate.Footnote17 During my fieldwork, the group was remarkably active. The number of original posts varied between 80 and 120 per day, with some individual posts drawing as many as 50 comments. I collected data from this group during three weeks in June and July 2020. During this period, the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic had just receded, infection numbers were low and most of the restrictions introduced by the Austrian government had been lifted. However, a public and political debate was ongoing about the dangers of a potential second wave of infections (which eventually hit Austria in autumn 2020), the merits of various mitigation strategies (especially masks), and the dangers of the virus itself. The material gathered in this group thus allowed me to study the impact of the COVID crisis on a social environment already saturated with cultures of rejection.
Research for the second online ethnography I draw on for this article took place in the first months of 2021. During the second half of 2020, it became more obvious that conflicts over the COVID crisis had become increasingly relevant in Austrian politics, as elsewhere. Between July 2020 and January 2021, scepticism and denial regarding the nature of COVID-19 and open rejection of anti-COVID-measures spilled over from everyday conversations into street mobilizations. During this period, the far-right populist Freiheitliche Partei Öesterreichs (FPÖ, Austrian Freedom Party) began supporting protests against anti-COVID measures, and Austria’s largest private television channel, ServusTV, owned by the right-wing billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz, offered increasingly sympathetic coverage to the emerging movement. Inspired by the so-called ‘Querdenker’ (lateral thinkers) movement in Germany, which was able to mobilize large crowds in Berlin, Stuttgart and other cities during the summer of 2020,Footnote18 the Austrian ‘corona protest movement’ had its peak in late January 2021, when between 10,000 and 50,000 people defied a police ban to protest against the government’s COVID regulations on the streets of Vienna.Footnote19 In the context of deplatforming strategies adopted by Facebook,Footnote20 the messenger service Telegram emerged as the movement’s most important digital infrastructure in both Germany and Austria.Footnote21 Described as an ‘El Dorado of free speech’, it allowed movement activists and entrepreneurs to create a vast network of channels (which users could ‘follow’, permitting one-way communication from one account to a large audience) and groups (for discussion among members).Footnote22 This communicative ecosystem allowed leaders, followers and sympathizers to mobilize and communicate content to large groups of people. But it was also a digital space for debate and conversation, albeit within narrow discursive borders defined by group administrators, who had the power to remove and ban individual users from channels and groups. This digital environment offered a promising avenue for further research into COVID-related cultures of rejection. I identified the largest and most vibrant Telegram groups connected to the Austrian corona protest movement and joined them, observing the discursive practices taking place in these groups over a period of two months. As with the first online space, this ethnographic study culminated in a period of intense and systematic observation of one particular group. During one week in March 2021, I collected all data uploaded to the group 'Österreich steht auf' (Austria Rises), the largest and most active of the groups observed. With 5,486 members as of 2 March 2021, between 100 and 300 individual messages were shared each day in the group during this week. In contrast to the material gathered in the first online space, here I gained insight into the dynamics within a group that is explicitly dedicated to the topic of COVID, rejects anti-COVID measures and is connected to a variety of political practices in both offline and online spaces.
Disruption and re-articulation: COVID-related cultures of rejection in a Viennese Facebook group
When I started investigating the first online space (‘Danube’), the Facebook group had close to 20,000 members. While not all of them currently lived or worked in the two districts of Vienna to which the group was dedicated, observation over time made it clear that the group was indeed embedded in the local lives of people in the twenty-first and twenty-second districts. Members asked for recommendations for local shops or restaurants, kindergartens and doctors in the area. Some shared pictures of their lunch meals, including the receipt, to guide others towards a reasonably priced Wiener schnitzel. Other frequent types of contributions consisted of sharing local news about traffic accidents or street crime, asking others if they had further information, as well as links to or screenshots of other websites, most often news media, dealing with various local, national or international topics. This was in line with the group’s guidelines. In its ‘info’ section, the administrators encourage members to ‘discuss this and that, pro and contra, simply everything that our districts, the city, Austria and the world have to offer’. These discussions—usually prompted, again, by a photograph, a video, or a link to or a screenshot of a piece of news, together with a brief comment—took the form of comments under individual posts.
It was obvious that both individual posts and comments were heavily dominated by political orientations that tended to the right of the political spectrum. This was unsurprising to us, and indeed had been one of the reasons the group was chosen in the first place. When one female warehouse worker told us about the group in an interview, she added that she had joined it to learn more about the area she worked in, but left it after a few weeks because she found a lot of the content targeting migrants and minorities ‘disgusting’. Other workers referred more positively to the group but didn’t mention its political content at all. As I found in the course of my investigation, the group had been temporarily closed by Facebook in February 2018, when a local newspaper revealed that members had shared racist hate speech, including pictures and comments expressing support for National Socialism and denying the Holocaust.Footnote23 To prevent a permanent ban, group administrators introduced a ‘code of conduct’ in which they claimed that ‘racist statements, hate speech and incitements to violence’ were ‘not welcome’. They also seemed to have banned those members who were responsible for overt racism and fascist propaganda. When I began monitoring the group in May 2020, even though it was still dominated by far-right content, it was not politically or ideologically uniform. A vocal minority in the community continued to challenge racist comments and interpretations, and contributed to a significant share of the posts and discussions.
A typical instance of a discussion provoking a barrage of racist remarks occurred when a user shared a picture together with a quotation, taken out of context, in which the then-leader of the Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs (SPÖ, Social Democratic Party of Austria), Pamela Rendi-Wagner, seemed to argue that, in order to reduce crime rates among foreigners, the state should raise the minimum rate of benefits for the unemployed. In dozens of comments, group members shared their outrage over ‘stupid, naive leftists’. One reply read: ‘You could pay them 10,000 or more per month, they would still be and remain criminals. They live in their own culture and are not interested in integrating. Most of these creatures are only interested in our welfare system, “money for no work!”.’ Such statements drew substantial agreement, indicated by ‘likes’ and affirmative comments. In these and similar discussions, however, there were also group members arguing against this racist current. In this case, a user asked that the quote above be put into the appropriate context: ‘Every normal capable person can see that what she probably means is that there is a link between poverty and property crime.’
Apart from crime and migration—two topics often discussed as if they were one—I found two other, sometimes overlapping, topics that triggered similarly intense discussion: urban transportation and climate change. I observed openly hostile debates between car drivers and bicycle riders over efforts by the Vienna city administration—then led by a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens—to encourage climate-friendly transportation. Here, too, the lines of demarcation were clearly drawn between what can be roughly described as a right-wing majority and a left-liberal minority.
To summarize, what I found in this group was a social space dominated by everyday cultures of rejection, both in terms of topics—migration, street crime, welfare, ecology—and objects of rejection—‘foreigners’, ‘criminals’, ‘lazy welfare scroungers’, ‘stupid politicians’, ‘law-breaking cyclists’ and ‘naive leftists’. To borrow the vocabulary of Laclauian hegemony theory, I encountered a discursive space structured by an antagonism in which the objects of rejection formed a ‘chain of equivalence’,Footnote24 according to which those that invested in cultures of rejection could define themselves as genuine, law-abiding, hard-working people, performing masculinities centred around physical toughness, the embrace of state violence and private motorized vehicles.Footnote25 In this sense, they were largely in congruence with the world-view of authoritarian populism.Footnote26 What, then, was the impact of the COVID crisis on this space? Recent discussions and early analyses of phenomena such as COVID denialism, ‘anti-vaxxers’ or protest movements against anti-COVID measures tend to paint a picture in which opposition to the ‘mainstream’ of COVID politics finds itself in a natural alliance with right-wing populism and its supporters.Footnote27 In my study, however, I found a more complicated constellation.
Analysing discussions in the ‘Danube’ group that dealt with COVID-related topics, I found that the clear-cut antagonism described above, which had structured the discursive space in almost all other instances, no longer held up. When issues such as mandatory face masks were discussed, for example, I did find the conversations to be contentious and often vitriolic, in a similar way to other topics. However, here the antagonism seemed to cut right across the usual cleavages and left-right polarizations. In one instance in July 2020, a member posted a news article reporting that the SPÖ leader Rendi-Wagner, who was a regular object of ridicule, rejection and outright hate in the group (and who also happened to be a medical doctor by training), proposed a return to a policy of mandatory face masks. The ensuing debate divided those in the group usually united in their opposition to her ‘leftism’. ‘Unfortunately, she might just be right on that one’, one user commented, with many more agreeing with him. Another user shared the picture described above, featuring Rendi-Wagner with her supposed quote about criminal foreigners, in an obvious attempt to undermine her, but added supportively: ‘She should only talk about things where she is an expert. And as a medical doctor, she is [in this case]. I could see her as health minister, but not as head of government.’ Other members voiced their opposition and connected Rendi-Wagner’s proposition to ‘leftist paternalism’. ‘A typical socialist’, one user commented, ‘wants to dictate everything’. ‘Complete idiocy!’, another group member agreed: ‘We have to wear masks on public transport anyway! What does she want? Typical red paternalism, always imposing restrictions on our lives!’
Not only did the division between supporters and opponents of mask mandates cut through usual affiliations in this online space; it also re-articulated some of the issues that are most commonly part of the prevalent cultures of rejection. In these debates, migrants and racialized/culturalized Others figured as objects of rejection primarily among those who supported the Social Democrats’ demand for mandatory mask wearing. ‘What a pile of shit!’, one user commented:
Hardly anybody abides by the rules these days. I confront everyone who doesn’t wear a mask on public transport personally, with whatever the consequences might be. . . . Those rats endanger other people’s lives . . . and it’s just a fact that it’s always the same kind of people.
This was most obvious in discussions about Austrian residents with family ties to West Balkan and Eastern European countries, many of whom chose to visit their relatives during the summer holidays. In July 2020, Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz claimed—without the data to support it—that rising numbers of infections were due to migrants living in Austria. In a TV interview Kurz said: 'We had very, very low infection numbers in the summer after the lockdown, but then we had new infections brought into the country through returning holiday travelers, especially those who spent the summer in their home countries.'Footnote28 This prompted heated debates in the ‘Danube’ group. In one comment section, two female users quarrelled in a back-and-forth exchange of comments. One was vocal about her support for protective measures against COVID infections, and finally summarized her position in a one-liner: ‘Close the borders and basta!’ Her adversary, an outspoken COVID-denier and opponent of any protective measures, countered by explaining that closed borders would mean that many essential workers would not be able to return to the country. Others made fun of her call for closed borders, ridiculing her as easily scared since they didn’t see the virus as a threat. In this and other instances it became clear that COVID-related topics had the potential for disrupting and re-articulating previously stable discursive formations.
A final example of the disruptive effect of the COVID crisis can be seen in the way official case numbers were discussed in the group. As in the debates around protective measures, I found these discussions to be marked by conflict and at times hostility. Some group members approached the official COVID numbers, which were introduced frequently by users who shared pictures and news reports, with a high degree of scepticism. This would affirm previous analyses of ‘populist sentiments’ as prioritizing feeling over facts, mounting what Rogers Brubaker calls an ‘experiential challenge to expertise’.Footnote29 Indeed, as William Davies has shown, ‘the institutions whose credibility is in greatest trouble around the world are those that are professionally tasked with representing society’; some members viewed those disseminating official statistics as a preeminent object of populist suspicion and rejection, as opposed to those advocating a state of ‘feeling beyond statistics’.Footnote30 In COVID-related cultures of rejection, the rejection of statistical, medical and scientific expertise in the name of embodied ‘truth-feeling’ plays a substantial role, as we will see in the next section. However, in the social space investigated here, I found a more complex situation. Some users challenged official COVID numbers and explanations of potential effects of infection with anecdotal knowledge and by referring to what they felt was right and wrong. As one group member put it in a comment: ‘I still have my common sense, I just do everything as I always did and won’t let them stop me.’ But this was not the dominant means by which users challenging official numbers presented their arguments. To the contrary, most employed a discursive strategy aimed at ‘out-rationalizing’ official statistics. They went to great lengths to present their arguments in the most disinterested way, referring to what they claimed were category errors in conflating the number of positive tests, of actual infections and of people falling ill. These users were eager to provide links and numbers, and used technical terms from mathematics, medicine and epidemiology. On the other hand, their opponents—those considered the ‘non-populists’ in the framework of ‘pandemic populism’—tended to reply to these challenges by referring to concrete, strongly emotionally charged experiences and hypotheticals. To one such ‘disinterested’ relativization of the threat posed by COVID, a user replied: ‘Would you still say that if your mother, father or even your child got the virus?’ This pattern—a strong performance of disinterested rationality among COVID deniers or relativizers on the one hand, and an equally strong appeal to personal experience and emotions on the other—was repeatedly observed during the weeks of fieldwork. To avoid any potential misunderstandings: this is not a statement about the substantial truth of any of these claims. It seems clear that those downplaying the threat of COVID were acting against the overwhelming evidence provided by the scientific and medical community. What I found interesting was the reversal of roles usually attributed to populists and their opponents. Here, again, we see an element of the profoundly disruptive quality of the COVID crisis on existing cultures of rejection.
Rejecting and constructing authority: COVID-related cultures of rejection in a Telegram group
The second online space in which I conducted an online ethnography differs from the first in a number of significant aspects.Footnote31 The Telegram group ‘Austria Rises’ was part of a large network of Telegram channels and groups connecting opponents of the Austrian government’s anti-COVID measures. Technically, it functioned as a large group chat, in which every member could send messages to the entire group, in this case consisting of more than 5,000 users. Primarily designed to function on mobile devices—though desktop applications for all major operating systems exist as well—every group member received a visual and/or acoustic notification for every message sent. Even if a group member were to ‘mute’ the group on their phone, they would still see the number of unread messages on their device. With more than 100 daily messages in just this one group, and many users being members of several similar groups of comparable size, the sheer amount of information might easily feel overwhelming. Compared to the Facebook group discussed above, I also found a greater diversity of media types. As in the Facebook group, users often shared links, memes, infographics and so-called ‘sharepics’ related to the topics at hand. In addition, shared content also included privately recorded videos and audio as well as written messages. The architecture of this space thus felt ‘flatter’, not integrated within a complex website governed by algorithms like the Facebook group, but delivering a straightforward, chronological sequence of messages. Yet it also felt more complex, with different types of media constantly reaching one’s device. What is more, on the Telegram app, a group like ‘Austria Rises’ is situated between private groups and individual chats, giving the user’s experience a more private, even intimate quality. Taken together, these features bestow a specific affective quality to the use of Telegram, creating a liminal space between the private and the public, the intimate and the political. This quality makes the app particularly amenable to communities dedicated to the COVID pandemic, which in its very nature challenges the distinction between private and political spaces and affects virtually everyone in intimate ways.
Observing ‘Austria Rises’ over several weeks, I found that it served a number of different purposes for its members. One was the mobilization for protest marches, vigils and demonstrations. Organizers regularly shared emotional appeals to join the protests on the streets, as well as practical information, particularly for people living outside Vienna who wanted to join the larger demonstrations in the capital. A second purpose was to engage in strategic discussions. As presented in more detail below, while group members were united in their opposition to the government’s anti-COVID measures, they differed significantly in their assessments of the political situation, their strategic outlooks and their long-term goals. A third purpose was to share counter-information on anything related to COVID. Finally, users shared personal anecdotes and stories they had heard, and asked for and offered advice. This message is one example of the latter (note the intimate tone while addressing the more than 5,000 users), sent to the group by a female-presenting username:
Hello my darlings. Can someone help me? My sister doesn’t send her children to school because she doesn’t want them to get tested or wear masks. She’s unemployed. Now she has to apply for a job where she would have to work mornings and wear a mask. . . . Job centre says she has to take the job and send her kids to school. But she doesn’t want to have her kids tested. Now the job centre is threatening to cut her benefits! This is a disgrace!
Other users responded sympathetically, offering advice on how to file a complaint against the job centre. Similar requests came from other group members. One wrote that he lost his job because he refused to wear a mask and asked if people could refer him to a lawyer who would be sympathetic to his case. Others identified themselves as the owners of shops, cafes and beauty salons who refused to ask customers to wear masks or show their negative test results (as was required by law). One mother asked group members if they knew of any childcare providers who didn’t require testing (as was, again, required by law). ‘Where do you live?’ one user replied. ‘I can offer myself as caregiver. I’m unemployed and used to work as a kindergarten teacher.’ Such interactions indicate that the online space I investigated was, in part, a network of mutual support addressing everyday problems. These problems, however, only arose out of group members’ adamant rejection of anti-COVID measures. How, then, did they justify this rejection, and how did it relate to other elements of rejection?
While the ‘Danube’ Facebook group was a space of contentious engagement with COVID-related topics, members of the ‘Austria Rises’ Telegram group were united in their practical, discursive and affective investment in COVID-related cultures of rejection. The constitutive objects of rejection were always external to the group. Administrators took care to keep it like that. When users joined the group to argue for the usefulness of masks, testing or vaccinations, they were swiftly removed. Another difference was the notable presence of conspiracy theories. Various members claimed that the virus was part of a ‘plan’ executed by order of ‘the Rockefellers’, ‘the Bilderbergers’ or just unidentified ‘global elites’. Others blamed ‘Chinazis’ and ‘Chinese agents in our governments’, Bill Gates or the leaders of the World Economic Forum. The role of conspiracy theories in COVID-related cultures of rejection has recently been described and analysed extensively.Footnote32 In this group, the spread of conspiracy theories, while notable, remained limited to a minority of users. What connected members on a more fundamental level, in contrast to those participating in the Facebook group, was a deep mistrust and an active rejection of a larger set of authorities. This included politicians and political parties; media outlets including, but not restricted to, legacy media; scientific authorities such as medical experts and scholarly institutions; and public health institutions. This rejection of authorities was, in turn, supplemented by performative constructions of counter-authorities. In the following concluding section, I will discuss and interpret the various ways in which this performance of rejection and affirmation played out, and what they tell us about the contradictory nature of COVID-related cultures of rejection and protest movements.
Discussion: rejection and affirmation in COVID-related cultures of rejection
The COVID crisis clearly had a disruptive effect on existing cultures of rejection and the social spaces in which they are negotiated. This was demonstrated in the investigation of the ‘Danube’ Facebook group, in which discussions related to the pandemic dislodged some of the existing antagonisms and created new fissures and conflicts. The Telegram group ‘Austria Rises’, in contrast, had only come into existence as part of the emergence of COVID-related cultures of rejection. It represented a consolidated community based on the explicit rejection of the Austrian government’s anti-COVID measures, building on and radicalizing a previously existing crisis of authority, and adding science and public health institutions as new objects of rejection. In this sense, it represented a continuation of previously described, pre-COVID cultures of rejection, but also exhibits new qualities, particularly those in which participants react to a perceived crisis of authority by constructing various types of counter-authorities.Footnote33
One such construction relied on hyper-individualism. Group members rejected political and social authorities in the name of a do-it-yourself ethos, which was frequently condensed in calls to ‘think for yourself’, ‘do your own research’ and ‘help yourself’. When rumours began to spread that facemasks were infected with tiny organisms, group members shared homemade videos in which they dissected masks under a microscope. ‘We should only trust what we see with our own eyes’, a user explained when he shared one such video. ‘We need no leaders’, another user proclaimed proudly, in response to a message in which another group member lamented that she felt that she didn’t know who to trust anymore. ‘Lead yourself!’ he added. This strategy was often connected to the prioritization of embodied, practical knowledge and an emphasis on one’s own body, health and immune system. One group member summarized this outlook succinctly: ‘Folks, don’t waste your time with unnecessary things, keep your families close, give up on the media. Start to exercise, eat healthily, and above all, engage with more significant matters than all these superficialities. A sane mind needs a healthy body, keep your heart pure!’
Partly in contrast to this individualism, partly supplementing it, I found a strategy that emphasized counter-expertise. Here, the aim was to establish alternative authorities to the ones that were rejected, but on the same playing field. Prominent ‘dissident’ scientists and doctors played a crucial role here, and so did videos by people claiming to have medical expertise. ‘Finally, a doctor says the truth’, one user commented, ‘share this video with all your contacts!’ When users shared the opinions of ‘dissident experts’ in the Telegram group, they often emphasized the current or former institutional affiliations and academic titles of these authorities. At first glance, such strategies seemed to contradict claims that a characteristic feature of ‘pandemic populism’ was its rejection of expertise and science. ‘Science-related populism’, according to Niels Mede and Mike Schäfer, constructs a ‘morally charged antagonism between an (allegedly) virtuous ordinary people and an (allegedly) unvirtuous academic elite’.Footnote34 What I observed here, however, was not the unity of ‘ordinary people’s’ common sense against scientific elites, but the performative construction of alternative scientific elites, and the appropriation of scientific authority. We interpreted this summoning of counter-expertise as a practice that transformed the nature of expertise itself. ‘Expert knowledge,’ argued William Davies,
takes the form of a promise: trust me, these are the facts. . . . The basic injunction of any leader is follow me. The question is not whether everyone agrees on the state of affairs, but how everybody’s physical, intellectual and emotional movements can be brought into some kind of alliance with each other. The feeling that the great leader engenders is not trust so much as loyalty.Footnote35
‘Alternative experts’ who played such a crucial role in COVID-related cultures of rejection also operated in this way: not as experts, but as leaders. What they engendered among group members I observed was not trust, but the confidence that, in a conflict, they were part of one’s team. A third way in which authority was reconstituted in COVID-related cultures of rejection was the frequent appeal to juridical authority. This took various forms. One was the celebration of ‘dissident’ lawyers, similar to the alternative medical experts described above. While the state and its institutions were rejected and seen as irredeemably poisoned by corruption or as part of a global conspiracy, for many group members the juridical sphere, judges and the constitution became positive reference points. Defending his decision to ignore the government’s anti-COVID measures, one user stated: ‘We are acting according to the constitution, and basta! We will collectively sue the government. And the opposition and the media.’ Similarly, another user claimed: ‘From now on, no law is in effect. This is pure despotism. I am acting in accordance with the constitution, as I knew it before corona. FULL STOP.’ Others called for the preparation of new laws for the ‘day after’, expecting not just the fall of the government but something like a revolution. Part of this appeal to juridical authority was reflected in users trying to acquire legal knowledge. One member quipped: ‘Just yesterday, I formulated an objection for a friend. In the meantime, I have become something like the corona lawyer among my friends.’ The mutual help network described above included the sharing of documents group members claimed would exempt them from wearing masks or getting tested. In a world that felt like it had gone crazy, in which anti-COVID measures had disrupted daily routines and made new demands on everyday behaviour, and where traditional institutions of authority were seen as part of a sinister conspiracy, the repeated interpellation of juridical norms, high courts and the constitution represented an Archimedean point, a stable foundation from which the world in turmoil could be judged.
These results can contribute to a fuller understanding of the protest movements that became particularly powerful in Austria in late 2020 and throughout 2021. Sociologists have called those who came together in rejecting anti-COVID measures on the street as well as in online spaces a ‘counter-community’,Footnote36 or a ‘community of mistrust’,Footnote37 one that exhibits a high degree of trust in its own political efficacy. This stands in stark contrast to previous field work, in which informants described their social and political worlds as unchangeable, and their own influence as insignificant, if not non-existent.Footnote38 As Sebastian Koos reports, 83 per cent of respondents participating in ‘Querdenker’ protests in Germany said that ‘you can make a difference if you get involved’.Footnote39 This sentiment is clearly shared by the Telegram group observed in this study. In consolidated COVID-related cultures of rejection, I have found attempts to reconstitute sovereignty through the performative construction of counter-authorities, and a high level of political activity fuelled by what Koos calls ‘Selbstwirksamkeitsüberzeugung’: a belief in political self-efficacy.Footnote40 Based on conspiratorial, often paranoid world-views and an active rejection not just of political authorities but of institutions tasked with the statistical representation of the social world, these COVID-related communities are reshaping our previous understanding of cultures of rejection. The COVID crisis has indeed transformed the conditions in which authoritarian populist politics operate in deep and meaningful ways.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Benjamin Opratko
Benjamin Opratko was a post-doc researcher in the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, and is currently Assistant Professor (non-tenure track) at the Institute of Sociology and Cultural Organisation at Leuphana University Lüneburg. His research investigates empirical and theoretical aspects of contemporary authoritarian populism, racism and Islamophobia in Europe. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6120-466X
Notes
1 Paolo Nicola Barbieri and Beatrice Bonini, ‘Political orientation and adherence to social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy’, Economia Politica, vol. 38, no. 2, 2021, 483–504; Jakob-Moritz Eberl, Robert A. Huber and Esther Greussing, ‘From populism to the “plandemic”: why populists believe in COVID-19 conspiracies’, Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, vol. 31, supplement 1, 2021, 272–84; Alexi Gugushvili, Jonathan Koltai, David Stuckler and Martin McKee, ‘Votes, populism, and pandemics’, International Journal of Public Health, vol. 65, no. 6, 2020, 721–2; Patrick Mellacher, ‘The impact of corona populism: empirical evidence from Austria and theory’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 209, 2023, 113–40; Almudena Recio-Román, Manuel Recio-Menéndez and María Victoría Román-González, ‘Vaccine hesitancy and political populism: an invariant cross-European perspective’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (online), vol. 18, no. 24, 2021, article no. 12953, https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182412953.
2 Svenja Boberg, Thorsten Quandt, Tim Schatto-Eckrodt and Lena Frischlich, ‘Pandemic populism: Facebook pages of alternative news media and the corona crisis: a computational content analysis’, 10 April 2020, Muenster Online Research (MOR) Working Paper/1/2020, available at https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.02566.pdf (viewed 6 July 2023); Ulrike M. Vieten, ‘The “new normal” and “pandemic populism”: the COVID-19 crisis and anti-hygienic mobilisation of the far-Right’, Social Sciences (online), vol. 9, no. 9, 2020, article no. 165, https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci9090165.
3 Dominik A. Stecula and Mark Pickup, ‘How populism and conservative media fuel conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 and what it means for COVID-19 behaviors’, Research and Politics (online), vol. 8, no. 1, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168021993979.
4 Niels G. Mede and Mike S. Schäfer, ‘Science-related populism: conceptualizing populist demands toward science’, Public Understanding of Science, vol. 29, no. 5, 2020, 473–91.
5 Rogers Brubaker, ‘Paradoxes of populism during the pandemic’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 164, no. 1, 2021, 73–87.
6 Vieten, ‘The “new normal” and “pandemic populism”’.
7 Markus Brunner, Antje Daniel, Florian Knasmüller, Felix Maile, Andreas Schadauer and Verena Stern, ‘Corona-Protest-Report: Narrative–Motive–Einstellungen’, SocArXiv Papers, 2021, https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/25qb3; Nadine Frei, Robert Schäfer and Oliver Nachtwey, ‘Die Proteste Gegen die Corona-Maßnahmen’, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, vol. 34, no. 2, 2021, 249–58; Christine Hentschel, ‘“Das große Erwachen”: Affekt und Narrativ in der Bewegung gegen die Corona-Maßnahmen’, Leviathan, vol. 49, no. 1, 2021, 62–85; Sebastian Koos, ‘Konturen einer heterogenen “Misstrauensgemeinschaft”: Die soziale Zusammensetzung der Corona-Proteste und die Motive ihrer Teilnehmer:innen’, in Sven Reichardt (ed.), Die Misstrauensgemeinschaft der ‘Querdenker’: Die Corona-Proteste aus kultur- und sozialwissenschaftlicher Perspektive (Frankfurt and New York: Campus 2021), 67–89; Oliver Nachtwey, Robert Schäfer and Nadine Frei, ‘Politische Soziologie der Corona-Proteste’, SocArXiv Papers, 2020. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/zyp3f.
8 Quinn Slobodian and William Callison, ‘Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol’, 5 January 2021, available on the Boston Review (online), available at https://bostonreview.net/politics/william-callison-quinn-slobodian-coronapolitics-reichstag-capitol (viewed 6 July 2023).
9 Simon Teune, ‘Querdenken und die Bewegungsforschung–neue Herausforderung oder déjà-vu?’, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, vol. 34, no. 2, 2021, 326–34.
10 Alexander Harder and Benjamin Opratko, ‘Digitale Abgründe’, Tagebuch, no. 5, 2021, 14–19; Isabell Otto, ‘“Querdenken” in Smartphone-Gemeinschaften: Digitale Skills und Medienmisstrauen in einem Telegram- Gruppenchat’, in Reichardt (ed.), Die Misstrauensgemeinschaft der ‘Querdenker’, 159–223.
11 For research design and conceptual framework, see the Cultures of Rejection website, available at www.culturesofrejection.net (viewed 4 July 2023).
12 danah boyd, ‘Social network sites as networked publics: affordances, dynamics, and implications’, in Zizi Papacharissi (ed.), A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (London and New York: Routledge 2011), 39–58; Christine Hine, Virtual Ethnography (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage 2000 ); Robert V. Kozinets, Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online (Los Angeles and London: Sage 2009); Piia Varis, ‘Digital ethnography’, in Alexandra Georgakopoulou and Tereza Spilioti (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication (London and New York: Routledge 2016), 55–68.
13 Jannis Androutsopoulos, ‘Potentials and limitations of discourse-centred online ethnography’, Language@Internet (online), vol. 5, 2008, article 8, available at www.languageatinternet.org/articles/2008/1610 (viewed 6 July 2023).
14 Quoted in Sally Baker, ‘Conceptualising the use of Facebook in ethnographic research: as tool, as data and as context’, Ethnography and Education, vol. 8, no. 2, 2013, 131–45 (140).
15 Danielle N. Jacques, ‘Using MAXQDA in ethnographic research: an example with coding, analyzing, and writing’, in Michael C. Gizzi and Stefan Rädiker (eds), The Practice of Qualitative Data Analysis: Research Examples Using MAXQDA (Berlin: MAXQDA 2021), 17–33; Udo Kuckartz and Stefan Rädiker, Analyzing Qualitative Data with MAXQDA: Text, Audio, and Video (Cham: Springer 2019), 171–86.
16 Cf. Alexander Harder and Benjamin Opratko, ‘Cultures of rejection at work: investigating the acceptability of authoritarian populism’, Ethnicities, vol. 22, no. 3, 2022, 425–45; Benjamin Opratko, ‘Ablehnungskulturen als Akzeptabilitätsbedingungen des autoritären Populismus’, in Seongcheol Kim and Veith Selk (eds), Wie weiter mit der Populismusforschung? (Baden-Baden: Nomos 2021), 177–94.
17 Cf. Gavan Titley, Is Free Speech Racist? (Medford, MA and Cambridge: Polity 2020); Aaron Winter, ‘Online hate: from the far-right to the “alt-right” and from the margins to the mainstream’, in Karen Lumsden and Emily Harmer (eds), Online Othering: Exploring Digital Violence and Discrimination on the Web, Palgrave Studies in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2019), 39–63.
18 Reichardt (ed.), Die Misstrauensgemeinschaft Der ‘Querdenker’; Callison and Slobodian, ‘Coronapolitics from the Reichstag to the Capitol’.
19 ORF, 'Festnahmen und Anzeigenflut bei CoV-Demo', 16 January 2021, available on the ORF website at https://wien.orf.at/stories/3085165/ (viewed 13 October 2023).
20 Richard Rogers, ‘Deplatforming: following extreme internet celebrities to Telegram and alternative social media’, European Journal of Communication, vol. 35, no. 3, 2020, 203–322.
21 Harder and Opratko, ‘Digitale Abgründe’.
22 Otto, ‘“Querdenken” in Smartphone-Gemeinschaften’, 174. Translations from the German, unless other stated, are by the authors.
23 Elisabeth Schwenter, ‘Hass, Verhetzung, Wiederbetätigung: Der braune Facebook-Sumpf über der Donau’, Meinbezirk.at, 28 February 2018, available at www.meinbezirk.at/wien/c-lokales/hass-verhetzung-wiederbetaetigung-der-braune-facebook-sumpf-ueber-der-donau_a2420587?cp=Kurationsbox (viewed 20 July 2023).
24 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London and New York: Verso 2085), 127–34 (127).
25 Dag Balkmar, ‘Violent mobilities: men, masculinities and road conflicts in Sweden’, Mobilities, vol. 13, no. 5, 2018, 717–32.
26 Stuart Hall, ‘Popular-democratic vs authoritarian populism: two ways of “taking democracy seriously”’, in Alan Hunt (ed.), Marxism and Democracy (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1980), 157–85.
27 Vieten, ‘The “new normal” and “pandemic populism”’; Fabian Virchow and Alexander Häusler, ‘Pandemie-Leugnung und extreme Rechte’, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, vol. 34, no. 2, 2021, 259–66; Sabine Volk, ‘Die rechtspopulistische PEGIDA in der COVID-19-Pandemie: Virtueller Protest “für unsere Bürgerrechte”’, Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen, vol. 34, no. 2, 2021, 235–48.
28 Natascha Strobl, 'Sebastian Kurz und das Balkan-Virus', Moment.at (online), 3 December 2020, available at www.moment.at/story/sebastian-kurz-und-das-balkan-virus (viewed 13 October 2023).
29 Brubaker, ‘Paradoxes of populism during the pandemic’, 75 (emphasis in original).
30 William Davies, Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World (London: Vintage 2019), 62.
31 This part of our research was conducted as part of the additional module CuRe-COV, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, dedicated to investigating Cultures of Rejection in the COVID crisis.
32 Eberl, Huber and Greussing, ‘From populism to the “plandemic”’; Adam M. Enders, Joseph E. Uscinski, Michelle I. Seelig, Casey A. Klofstad, Stefan Wuchty, John R. Funchion, Manohar N. Murthi, Kamal Premaratne and Justin Stoler, ‘The relationship between social media use and beliefs in conspiracy theories and misinformation’, Political Behavior, vol. 45, no. 2, 2023, 781–804; Stecula and Pickup, ‘How populism and conservative media fuel conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 and what it means for COVID-19 behaviors’; Richard A. Stein, Oana Ometa, Sarah Pachtman Shetty, Adi Katz, Mircea Ionut Popitiu and Robert Brotherton, ‘Conspiracy theories in the era of COVID-19: a tale of two pandemics’, International Journal of Clinical Practice (online), vol. 75, no. 2, 2021, doi.org/10.1111/ijcp.13778.
33 Manuela Bojadžijev and Benjamin Opratko, ‘Von der Willkommens- zur Ablehnungskultur?’, Forum Migration, vol. 12, no. 6, 2016, 1–2; Harder and Opratko, ‘Cultures of rejection at work’; Benjamin Opratko, ‘Die Kultur der Ablehnung’, Das Tagebuch, vol. 7/8, 2020, 16–21.
34 Mede and Schäfer, ‘Science-related populism’, 473.
35 Davies, Nervous States, 148.
36 Carolin Amlinger and Oliver Nachtwey, ‘Die Risikogesellschaft und die Gegenwelt’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 February 2021.
37 Johannes Pantenburg, Sven Reichardt and Benedikt Sepp, ‘Wissensparallelwelten der “Querdenker”’, in Reichardt (ed.), Die Misstrauensgemeinschaft der ‘Querdenker’, 29–66.
38 Cf. (in this issue) Alexander Harder, ‘“Everything has changed”: right-wing politics and experiences of transformation among German retail workers’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 56, no. 4/5, 2022, 219–35.
39 Koos, ‘Konturen einer heterogenen “Misstrauensgemeinschaft”’, 78.
40 Ibid.