Influencer in Uniform: Wenn die Exekutive viral geht
© CC-BY-SA 4.0 Stella Schiffczyk / netzpolitik.org
Published in March 2018 on netzpolitik.org
Authors: Markus Reuter, Alexander Fanta, Marie Bröckling, Luca Hammer
More than 100 German police forces are active on Twitter around the clock. A data analysis by Netzpolitik.org and data scientist Luca Hammer takes a close look at the digital work of the authorities. We show how the police use the social network to create a new form of publicity for themselves.
German police forces are reinventing themselves on social media. Where once there was a brittle official charm, officers are now tweeting casual slogans, accompanying demonstrations with social media teams in real time, and warning party-hungry youths against making too much noise. Is that legal? Netzpolitik.org identified around a hundred official Twitter accounts of German police authorities and analyzed around 163,000 tweets. Our report takes us through the world of police influencers and shows how the German executive branch goes viral. In this article, we provide a detailed data analysis. In our series "This is how the police tweet," we also offer an interview with an expert on digital policing, a look at the legal situation, and we highlight tricky cases and blunders in police social media work.
Why Twitter of all things?
Twitter plays a key role in the police's social media strategy. Only around three percent of the German population frequently use the short message service. Nevertheless, the police are just as present there as on they are on the far more popular Facebook. Twitter is particularly important for the public, because nowhere else can you find such a high concentration of politicians and journalists. With their strong presence on Twitter, police forces show that they not only reach the masses on the Internet - they specifically want to influence public discourse. That's why we focused on Twitter in our analysis.
How it all began
One of the first major police Twitter appearances in Germany was during the protests at the ECB summit in Frankfurt in 2015. At the time, Frankfurt officers used their still fairly new account to great effect, hurling around loose slogans and colorful pictures - and gaining 7,000 followers in a short time. In contrast to previous protests, the police were able to use tweets about the events to enter directly into the debate that had previously taken place without them and gain interpretive authority over the events. Even then, the approach raised questions among critics about the neutrality of the police.
Twitter has become an indispensable tool for German police forces since 2015. Just five years ago, the security authorities barely had a presence on social media. But since then, new accounts have mushroomed. "The year 2016 can be seen as the one in which digital communication via social media became a standard tool for the police in Germany," write criminologists Michael Johann and Michael Oswald in a book article. This statement is also backed up by our analysis of police Twittering in recent years.
Criminologist Thomas-Gabriel Rüdiger estimates that there are currently more than 300 official police channels on social media in Germany. Almost all of them are on Facebook and on Twitter. The work is done in large police forces by their own social media teams, which increasingly operate independently of traditional public relations. The official accounts are increasingly being joined by individual police officers who are more or less privately active.
The police network
Together with data journalist Luca Hammer, we analyzed 97 verified Twitter accounts of German state police forces and the federal police. We looked at their networks and recorded 3,200 past tweets each. For most police forces, this is enough to cover all past tweets. However, 23 accounts have already produced more tweets.
An evaluation of the police network on Twitter reveals close links to other police forces, including those abroad, as well as media accounts such as that of Spiegel Online and Tagesschau.
Reach with terror, tears, animals
To find out which content is particularly successful, we analyzed 162,946 tweets from German police forces. Of these, 10,577 were retweets and 152,369 were the police's own tweets. Police tweets received a total of 649,931 retweets (average 4.3; median 1) and 1,813,913 favs (average 11.1; median 3). German police forces used more than 15,000 different hashtags - ranging from #sweetbutt to #killingcrime. The most frequently used hashtag is #police.
From all tweets, we evaluated the frequency of words used. In the chart, the words that are used more are larger.
But which content really goes viral? In our analysis, we picked out the 100 most successful tweets according to retweets and favs. 34 tweets from the police received more than 1,000 retweets, 29 tweets more than 2,000 favs. Looking at the top tweets from German police forces, it is noticeable that tweets about dangerous situations received the widest distribution. Just under half of the top tweets have to do with rampages and terrorism, with the attack at Berlin's Breitscheidplatz and the Munich knifeman leading the way. Among the ten most retweeted tweets, six alone have the topic "Breitscheidplatz", the central plaza in Berlin, where in December 2016, an Islamist terrorist raced into a Christmas market. The most successful tweet from a police account called for no rumors to be spread in the context of the Breitscheidplatz attack. It was retweeted nearly 10,000 times and received more than 12,000 likes.
Animals always work. They are part of the standard repertoire in police tweeting and sometimes make it into the top tweets.
Police are also successful with tweets that appeal to emotions. Such tweets receive status messages about police officers being attacked, thanks to police officers for their strenuous deployment, but also thanks to citizens who provide officers with coffee during a deployment on the sidelines of the G20 summit. Or the report that the police had returned a child lost on a lantern parade to its parents.
Of course, animals must not be missing from the triad of Ts. They are part of the standard repertoire of police twittering and can be found at many police departments: Photos of police dogs with their masters, success stories about rescued animals or the recovery of missing pets. Animals are also represented several times in the top tweets: a recovered tomcat named "Mietzbert," a squirrel sitting on a police cap, or a call to pick up a lost Labrador mutt. The press office of the Munich police explained to netzpolitik.org that animals were among the "emotional topics". These would "as a rule achieve higher reach through the retweet or share function," while purely factual depictions often went under. In addition to terror, tears and animals, police departments are successful with tips and advice. The top tweets contain some advice, for example on how to form an emergency lane in roadworks.
Who do the police follow?
There is no uniform strategy here among German police forces. Some accounts, such as that of the Ludwigsburg police, have narrowly restricted following. They play it safe and only follow other police forces and state institutions. But it varies according to the tastes of the police social media team and local conditions. Take the North Hesse Police Department, for example: Because a ski jumping competition is taking place in their district, they follow the German ski jumping team. And a music festival in the region. In addition to this event-related following, however, the Northern Hesse police also subscribe to the police debate account Soli Davidwache and to a comedian. Following local media, police reporters, and the fire department and Red Cross is also very common. Occasionally, police officers also follow private police accounts, police unions, soccer clubs or private organizers and major events on Twitter.
It is clear that the neutrality requirement also applies when following other accounts. Lawyer and lecturer Heike Krischok, who deals with police in social media, told netzpolitik.org that police are not allowed to follow parties and political figures. In contrast, she said, it is permissible, albeit unprofessional, for police to follow their favorite curry joint on Twitter.
When do the police tweet?
The daily routine of the German police can also be seen in the rhythm of their activity in social media. For example, the executive branch usually tweets between Monday and Friday. And they prefer to do so during the day rather than at night. Nevertheless, the police are present on Twitter pretty much around the clock.
Who do the police retweet?
In total, the police forces studied retweeted tweets from 851 accounts. However, almost half of these were retweeted only once. 160 accounts were retweeted ten times or more. The retweet queen of the German police forces is the Emsland police. It was retweeted 397 times. Overall, this study shows that police forces like to retweet police forces. Only a few accounts crept in among the top 40 that are not police agencies. These include the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia, the Osnabrück transport community and a tweeting police officer.
Conclusion: The police are becoming influencers
The data paints a picture of a police force that has learned to communicate broadly, making more or less subtle use of emotions on the Internet. When individual tweets are disseminated thousands of times, it becomes clear that the officers have created a platform for themselves that is independent of local newspapers and press portals. More than ever, German police forces are claiming to have a direct impact on the public and present their version of reality. They create media hops via Twitter: tweets often end up unchecked in journalists' articles. This is a problematic balancing act, because the police themselves become a political player on Twitter. And Twitter becomes their power amplifier.
There is currently little uniformity in the everyday practices of police departments. Who the official accounts follow, how loosely they write and which tweets they fav is not regulated and varies everywhere. Large police stations such as Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin have their own guidelines for social media work. We would have liked to have a look at these, but unfortunately we are not allowed to: It is an "internal document", the Hessian police wrote to us on request.
Our research makes it clear how the state authorities are breaking new ground in social media. This concerns both the style of communication and the police's ability to disseminate their own messages and their mass impact. The analysis shows that the police took this step late, but then very quickly.
Police actions in social media, such as blocking accounts, sometimes lead the executive branch into a legal gray area. Unresolved are questions of neutrality, violations of objectivity and due diligence in the fast-moving use of the medium. These questions are becoming increasingly important with each passing day: Even if the security authorities have only recently begun to use Twitter & Co. for their own purposes, the routines that have now been established will remain and continue to shape police behavior for a long time to come.