Racism and Stereotyping of Refugees: The Use of the Hashtag #Aufschrei by Twitter Users in Germany

—This article analyzes the use of the hashtag #Aufschrei from the end of February to the end of March 2019. On January 25, 2013 Anne Wizorek, a German feminist, initiated the idea of encouraging German women to use the hashtag #Aufschrei to express their personal experiences of sexism and harassment, both verbal and sexual. The data used in this study are the 10 relevant tweets with the highest engagement scores, as reported by the Keyhole online tool. Based on their content, eight of the 10 tweets still adhered to Wizorek's initial intention, which was to bring attention to acts of violence against women and sexism. Further analysis, using the method of computer-mediated discourse analysis (CMDA) of the tweets, was applied to the data corpus. This showed that the hashtag #Aufschrei was also used to promote racist views as well as in attempts to form a stereotype of refugees from Muslim majority countries as a group that commonly perpetrates violence toward women.