The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the ‘passivation’ of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage’s heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system.

中文翻译：

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政治观点形成作为认知实践：#metwo的标签集合

本文为有关标签的政治用途的文献做出了贡献。我们认为，在民主政治背景下，可以通过数据化来表示民意的传统可以理解主题标签的组合。尽管传统的基于数据的认知实践（如民意测验）导致公民的“钝化”，但在数字星座中，这一趋势目前正在受到挑战。在Twitter之类的媒体中，主题标签充当技术操作员，以命令性地制造各种形式的公开表达的意见，这些意见在推文，算法和批评的组合中得以体现。我们根据经验丰富的社会失衡的表达及其政治放大，将这样的批判性公众概念化为对脱臼的认识感官。在意见形成方面，这构成了民主化的过程，即使在单个标签下也可以表达各种观点和问题。尽管存在这种多样性，但我们看到，与公共相关的参与者（例如新闻媒体）强烈倾向于将意见表达的数字形式表示为统一运动。我们认为，这种趋势可以部分地由网络媒体的提供来解释，这将客观化过程与观察者的网络位置联系起来。我们通过将网络分析和主题建模方法应用于196,987条推文的数据集，从经验上看似合理，该数据集是通过2018年夏天在德国Twitter圈中出现的#metwo主题标签抽样的，并结合了有关种族主义和身份的论述。根据这些数据，我们不仅证明了标签组合的异质性和对下级代理的潜力；我们还可以看到，作为认知实践的主题标签组合是如何固有地动态的，通过有限的观察能力和代表其在混合媒体系统中主张的参与者的积极参与，将其与民意测验区分开来。