Open Access

Sabine Ylönen

• Social media, asthe fifth estate, increasingly influence public dis-courses and play a major role in shaping public opinion.Undoubt-edly, they have the potential to promote participation and democra-cy. On the other side, they also constitute a risk for democratic soci-eties, as the spread of hate speech and fake news has shown. As aresponse,forms of counterspeech organisedby civil society have emerged in social media to counter the normalisation of hate speech and democracy-threateningdiscourses. In order to influence dis-course in social media in terms of the fifth estate, counterspeech campaigns must be visible alsoquantitatively. In this ethnographic contrastive study, I analysed the activitiesof the German and Finn-ish Facebook groups of the network #iamhere international. The in-tensity and continuity of their activities is obviously influenced by their strategic organisation: conventionalised rules support them whereas lacking or inconsequent rules seemed to be counterpro-ductive.