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Are we in a new “Polanyian moment”? If we are, it is essential to examine how “spontaneous” and punctual expressions of discontent at the individual level may give rise to collective discourses driving social and political change. It is also important to examine whether and how the framing of these discourses may vary across political economies. This paper contributes to this endeavor with the analysis of anti-finance discourses on Twitter in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK between 2019 and 2020. This paper presents three main findings. First, the analysis shows that, more than ten years after the financial crisis, finance is still a strong catalyzer of political discontent. Second, it shows that there are important variations in the dominant framing of public anti-finance discourses on social media across European political economies. If the antagonistic “us versus them” is prominent in all the cases, the identification of who “us” and “them” are, vary significantly. Third, it shows that the presence of far-right tropes in the critique of finance varies greatly from virtually inexistent to a solid minority of statements.
In times of increased political polarization, the continuing existence of a deliberative arena where people with antagonistic views may engage with each other in non-violent ways is critical for democracy to live on. Social media are usually not conceived as such arenas. On the contrary, there has been widespread worry about their role in increasing polarization and political violence. This paper suggests a more positive impact of social media on democracy. Our analysis focuses on the subreddit “r/WallStreetBets” (r/WSB) - a finance-related forum that came under the spotlight when its users coordinated a financial attack on hedge funds during the Gamestop saga in early 2021. Based on an original method attributing partisanship scores to users, we present a network analysis of interactions between users at the opposite sides of the political spectrum on r/WSB. We then develop a content analysis of politically relevant threads in which polarized users participate. Our analyses show that r/WSB provides a rare space where users with antagonistic political leanings engage with each other, debate, and even cooperate.