Populist narrative power in a globalised infosphere: a cross-language analysis

Populism constitutes one of the greatest challenges to democratic systems, and understanding its dynamics is key to combating it. In this article, we present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the conversation on Twitter around the anti-Covid protests in China, a seismic political event which at first glance seems wholly unconnected to populist movements in the West. However, our study shows that Western right-wing populists used the chance to draw parallels between Chinese and Western anti-lockdown protesters, furthering their agenda of painting democratic governments as authoritarian and tyrannical. We analyse a dataset of over four million tweets in English, German, and Chinese, showing that populists were the dominant voices in the English and German debates. By considering the structure of the underlying conservation network, we show that traditional media outlets largely ceded their editorial and interpretative power online, and were merely used as a source of footage. We show that, compared to the German sphere, English-speaking populists displayed a high degree of sophistication in constructing their narratives. Our research uncovers previously overlooked populist reframing capabilities, especially in relation to popular movements in non-democratic countries, and illustrates how 'reframing' is a more potent weapon in building populist narratives than outright misinformation.