Vortex of the Web. Potentials of the online environment

Dr. Martin Abdel Matin Gansinger (born 1979 in Austria) studied Communication Science and Political Science at the University of Vienna. He is currently holding the position of Head of Department / Public Relations at Girne American University.
Dr. Ayman Kole (born 1980 in Sydney, Australia) studied English, Literature, History, and Creative Writing at Charles Sturt University. He currently holds an academic position at Cyprus Science University.

From Spiral of Silence to Nexus of Noise:
The latest - and maybe most revealing - example of the populist, social media-oriented modus operandi of Austria's new government has been provided by Karoline Edtstadler, Secretary of State at the Federal Ministry of the Interior and member of Kurz' movement/party/personality cult. In perfect coherence to Colin Crouch (2004) and his definition of the post-democratic condition, she justified a controversially discussed law reform regarding sexual delinquents as corresponding to a perceived notion of natural justice that she declared to deduce directly from respective postings on Facebook and Twitter in the course of an interview on February 5, 2018 (Mayer, 2018).
It seems that the deduction is free from consideration of the unarguably limited ability for any of the strongly emotional content generated on these social media channels to produce balanced and objective views and arguments - next to presenting distorted representations of a perceived public opinion generated by algorithms - as well as acknowledgment of considerable criticism of opposing law experts. Similar to the somehow misleading idea of direct democracy in form of a referendum or vote, the conception of Edtstadler - stressing her obligation to push the agendas of anonymously acting shot callers on selected communication platforms as a primary guideline for her political mandate - unmistakenly demonstrates the post-democratic, populist conception of the politician as a faithful servant to the dictate of an intentionally perceived - or even self-adjusted - majority. Borrowing from the Crusaders, the convenient justification Facebook lo vult - Mob willing - comes into mind. Interestingly enough, only a few days later, the opportunist character of Kurz and his right-wing coalition partner was further underlined by the demonstrated determination to simply ignore a petition signed by more than 500.000 citizens that opted for a continuation of a general smoking ban and their determination to push things through on a parliamentary level before a referendum on the issue could be scheduled (Richter, 2018).
Either the displayed perception of Edstadler is simply revealing her illiteracy in terms of competence to decode our contemporary media surrounding or a cold-blooded instrumentalization of the random and distorting momentum that large parts of online communication patterns can be attributed with. While the latter seems to be common practice among political actors around the world, as demonstrated earlier, Edtstadler provides evidence to assume the previous possibility by her statement. Positioning postings on social media channels as directly analogues with the perception of the population serves to present Noelle-Neumann's Spiral of Silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1978) with a reversed juxtapose of a presumed Nexus of Noise. This perspective is supported by a recent study of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD, 2017) that demonstrates that a loud minority actively orchestrated social media campaigns against refugees during the elections in Germany. The research revealed that half of the likes signalizing support for hate-comments can be traced back to only five percent of the user accounts on the selected platforms. On top of it, the extremely active core of this minority - twenty-five percent of these likes seem to be generated by only one percent of the user profiles - deliberately aim at manipulating social media algorithms to magnify its impact. Coordinated activity along agreed upon timelines or the use of Hashtags are employed to boost the ranking of these contributions and therefore wrongly suggest their relevance to a broader part of the public. A ''monumental deception'' in the words of analyst Philip Kreißl (DPA, 2018), that is mainly generated by supporters of right-wing movements, as the study further reveals. Muslims and refugees list as the prime targets of these attacks in Austria, according to a report of th