Disrupting or invigorating an anti-democratic counterpublic? How highly active commenters engage on RT German’s Facebook page

Anti-democratic counterpublic news media frequently open up participatory spaces, inviting their audiences to partake in the discussion of their content. However, research on how commenters engage in such participatory spaces opened up and overseen by anti-democratic actors is scarce. In order to fill this gap, we present in this article a case study of the 250 most active commenters on RT German’s Facebook page in a 6-month period at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021. Using a mixed-methods approach combining large-scale data scraping with quantitative and qualitative content analysis, we find that the majority of these highly active commenters constituted an anti-democratic counterpublic. However, we also observed a smaller collective of commenters, whom we theorize as “disruptive public” as they vigorously sought to challenge the activities of the anti-democratic counterpublic. We discuss the benefits and risks of various strategies of disrupting anti-democratic counterpublics and consequences for democratic debate.