Platformised news, debate and video on the German public sphere. An empirical analysis

The so called social media promised to democratise the public sphere. Has the promise come true? What is the actual mix of agents who post on user upload platforms? Do the same media outlets and politicians dominate here as did on broadcasting or do common citizens have a share in public discourse? What are the different actors talking about? What relative impact do their posts have? Are they having conversations across borders or even across the entire continent? And what does empirical evidence tell us about the state of platformisation and Europeanisation and therefore about the state of the democratic, European, digital public sphere?

We explored these questions in the EU Horizon 2020 funded research project European Media Platforms: Assessing Negative and Positive Externalities for European Culture (EUMEPLAT) conducted by a consortium of eleven partners in ten countries. We based our data-driven approach on the conceptual foundation of Hallin and Mancini's (2004) model of media systems which we fruitfully applied in Work Package 1 (WP1; see Papathanassopoulos/Miconi 2023).

The following data have been conceptualised, extracted, processed and analysed in the context of three work packages for the purpose of comparison between the ten EUMEPLAT countries. Our data were extracted at the end of 2021 and the analyses conducted in 2022 and 2023. The resulting reports are: 

• WP2.2 Platformisation of News in 10 Countries (Cardoso et al. 2023)
• WP4.2. Representation of Immigration in Ten Countries (Carlson et al. 2023a)
• WP4.3. Representation of Gender in Ten Countries (Carlson et al. 2023b)
• WP4.5 Catalogue of Best Practices (Carlson et al. 2023c)
• WP3.2 Patterns in Platform Video Production in ten Countries (Boshnakova et al. 2023a)
• WP3.2 Patterns in Platform Video Consumption in ten Countries (Boshnakova et al. 2023b).

Out of these horizontal, comparative reports, the German national reports from the three work packages are compiled here in order to facilitate a vertical view. Readers who are interested in the results concerning only Germany might find this useful. We begin with a brief overview of our main findings, followed by the original German national reports.