Open Access

Sabine Ylönen

• Social media, as the fifth estate, increasingly influence public dis­courses and play a major role in shaping public opinion. Undoubt­edly, they have the potential to promote participation and democra­cy. On the other side, they also constitute a risk for democratic soci­eties, as the spread of hate speech and fake news has shown. As a response, forms of counterspeech organised by civil society have emerged in social media to counter the normalisation of hate speech and democracy-threatening discourses. In order to influence dis­course in social media in terms of the fifth estate, counterspeech campaigns must be visible also quantitatively. In this ethnographic contrastive study, I analysed the activities of the German and Finn­ish Facebook groups of the network #iamhere international. The in­tensity and continuity of their activities is obviously influenced by their strategic organisation: conventionalised rules support them whereas lacking or inconsequent rules seemed to be counterpro­ductive.