Hey man, it's good to be here. Thank you for having me. It's always special for me to be here. I saw in the, you know, you all saw in the bulletin that you're gonna have to listen to me three times in a row. So, you poor people, I'll do the best that I can. Pastor Anderson called me. I don't know, I can't even remember what day it was at this point, but he called me and he's like, I know it's short notice and, you know, you're busy and everything and I'm just, I'm thinking in my head. I'm like, yeah, it's short notice and I'm busy, but, you know, I wouldn't even be saved if it wasn't for this ministry. So, you know, I guess I'll squeeze it in, you know? I'm like, so anyway, thank you for inviting me. Of course, I'll be here Wednesday as well. Pastor Anderson did say, thanks for borrowing your pastor to all the churches. He's gonna be at Hold Fast Baptist on Wednesday in a few days. I actually have to go back tonight. So, Pastor Anderson said that I basically have to say amen and then sprint out the door in order to get to the airport. So, if I'm not here to talk to you after service this evening, you know, that's why. But I'm sure I'll get to talk to everybody. Looking forward to lots of familiar faces. I'm looking forward to seeing everybody. Lots of familiar faces. I just saw a couple of days ago at the Red Hot. So, I'm excited to visit with you all and I'll do the best that I can to edify you for the next three services. I'm excited about it. This morning, we're gonna look at Second Corinthians chapter seven in a few minutes.  I'm gonna do kind of a long intro this morning, kind of going through some simple doctrine and then I'll get to the point of the sermon. Turn to Mark chapter 11. You're gonna keep your place in Second Corinthians chapter number seven and turn to Mark chapter 11. I wanna talk for a few minutes about forgiveness, about this idea of forgiveness and what the Bible says about us and how we should forgive. Look at Mark chapter 11. Look at verse number 25 of Mark chapter 11. So, this is just introduction before we get to the sermon itself. Mark chapter 11, look at verse number 25. The Bible says, and when you stand praying, forgive. If you have ought against any that your father, which is also which is in heaven, may forgive you your trespasses. Verse 26, but if you do not forgive, neither will your father, which is in heaven, forgive your trespasses. So, we're gonna kind of look at a very broad methodology that is just brought up in the Bible over and over again. This is kind of the start of it right here. First of all, a lot of people that teach workspace salvation really just tear up these verses right here.  That would be a terrible mindset to have on looking at these verses. But you know, if you talk to Pentecostals and things like that, a little over the top on Pentecostals, I'm trying not to bring them up so much. But the Bible is basically saying that how we forgive other people affects whether or not God will forgive us. Talking about our relationship with our heavenly father who has adopted us is what it's talking about. It has nothing to do with your salvation. It's talking about a good relationship. Turn to Ephesians 4. Ephesians chapter 4. Let's look at another verse here. There's many verses on this, but I just kind of want to drive this point home before we get into the sermon this morning. Ephesians chapter 4, verse number 32, the Bible says this. It says, and be kind. I mean, the Bible kind of explains it in Ephesians chapter 4, like why we should be so forgiving and be kind to one to another, tenderhearted, verse 32. What? Forgiving one another. Even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. Now that's talking about your salvation right there. It's saying, look, while you were yet sinners, Christ died for you. So could you at least forgive your brother? Could you at least get along? God is kind of lecturing us here and telling us how we should have that forgiving attitude towards our neighbors, our brothers and sisters. Just like look at what God did for you. It's kind of making that comparison. Go to Matthew chapter 6. Matthew chapter 6. Matthew chapter 6 and look at verse 15. Again, the Bible says in Matthew chapter 6 in verse number, I just wanna point out how common this is in the Bible. This is really every Christian, once they're past the baby Christian part of their life should have this, this is God towards us. This is how God wants us to act because this is his attitude towards us. It's a very simple philosophy that God is pointing out to us here. But if you forgive not men, their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses.  This is just talking about having a right relationship with God. So you're supposed to forgive people. That's the first thing. You say, okay, but what if somebody, what if somebody keeps offending me? What if somebody keeps offending me? Like they don't get right. They keep doing things again and again to me. Like you just have like this friend or this brother or this neighbor or whatever. There's just a serial offender against me. You know, they keep borrowing money from me and you know, they keep saying, they keep saying things to me that offend me again and again, what do I do then? They keep, you know, here's one. This is like a pet peeve that offends me. Like I'm overly offended by this. People that are late. I don't know, it's just the thing for me. Like people that are late, like it's just like, if you're late, it's offensive to some people because like basically what you're saying is, is that the thing that you're going to is just like, you just don't care about that thing. That's what you're doing when you're late to all these people. To me, it's like, er, when people are late. I mean, look at all the, how many devices do we have today that make you not late? I mean seriously, it's like automatic. I mean, it's like you literally don't want to fix the problem. But the Bible is saying that people that are late, they're serial offenders. That's why I bring up this one thing. If they're late to one thing, they're late to everything. They're always late. Everybody knows they're late. They just can't show up on time to anything. Here's a side one for the young people. Don't ever be late to a job interview. You're like, does that happen? Yes, it happens all the time. You would be shocked. Don't show up late to a job interview and don't show up in your pajamas. There's two free lessons for you today. If you do those two things, I don't care if it is a job interview with McDonald's, wear a tie and show up early because if you're not early, you're late. I turn to Matthew chapter 18. So what if somebody, back to the point, back to the point, what if somebody's just a serial offender against me? Well, Jesus addresses this. He addresses this with Peter. Look at Matthew 18, look at verse number 21. Like somebody just keeps, I borrow this person money and they just keep never paying me back. Like this, it's just constant. I know that they're gonna do it. What do I do? Look at verse 21. Then Peter came to him and said, Lord, how off shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Till seven times? I mean, Peter, I'm assuming he's talking about, Luke 17 talks about, if someone sins against you seven times in a day, I met a Pentecostal woman that said one time, I'm saved as long as I don't sin seven times in a day. I'm like, talk about a gross misinterpretation of scripture that's gonna ruin your life. I mean, at least make it more, you know? But anyway, Peter's kinda asking like, how often do I have to forgive him like seven times and then Jesus say it then to him? I say not under the seven times, but until 70 times seven, you know, people are like, okay, 490 times I'm gonna start keeping track. What Jesus is saying is like, just keep forgiving people. Is what he's saying. I mean, this is pretty easy to understand. It's a direct question and a direct answer. You gotta really, you know, look at those great things that Jesus says. He just kinda like, kind of like where he tells us, you know, that few will be saved. You know, those direct answers from Jesus are just great. So the point is, is forgiveness, here's what I'm trying to get you to understand this morning. Forgiveness doesn't depend on the other person. Forgiveness, forgiveness depends on you. I mean, we're talking about, and here's a disclaimer. I'll give a disclaimer before we get into the sermon. We're talking about relationships with our brothers, with our neighbors. You know, we're not talking about, when I talk about forgiveness, we are commanded to forgive those whom God would forgive. So that's the disclaimer for the sermon. All right, we're not gonna be forgiving reprobates and forgiving people that are literal enemies of God. That's not what the Bible teaches anywhere. All right, and you look, I don't teach the, turn to Romans chapter 12. Let's just, here's the answer for that. Okay, here's the answer for that. Out soul winning, you will see this.  And you will see it, not me. You will see it every time you go out soul winning. But you will see it on a periodic basis. You will find people that have had run-ins with reprobates or someone in their family has been hurt by some evil wicked reprobate. And it is a stumbling block to salvation for them. You're saying that I can just trust on Jesus and see what they do is they think, you're saying anybody can just trust on Jesus and they'll go to heaven.  I don't preach the reprobate doctrine out soul winning in a regular case, but in that case I will. In that case I will. Why? Because it's necessary to preach that, to remove that stumbling block from that person. So they understand who God is. And then, once that stumbling, they're like, oh yeah, they get it, right? Didn't Jeffrey Dahmer accept Jesus? No, he didn't. No, he didn't. Look at Romans chapter 12. And Romans chapter 12 verse 19 takes care of those people. So we don't have to worry about forgiveness in those cases. All we have to do is trust the Lord. Look, dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves but rather get placed under wrath. For it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, sayeth the Lord. God's got that. That's what we need to teach those people. All right, so that's just a disclaimer on forgiveness this morning. Now, back to the sermon, back to the introduction to the sermon. Again, forgiveness is a, turn to James chapter two. Forgiveness is a one-way street. Forgiveness is something that, whether you forgive someone or not, is something that you control. Not anyone else. You completely control it. And look, that's good news. That's good news because whether or not you forgive somebody has a direct effect on how good your relationship with God is. What does that mean? That means that nobody else can destroy my relationship with God except this guy. I mean, that's pretty good news this morning. You know, put simpler, put in a better way, a more concise way. If you look down at James chapter two, look at verse 13. No one except you can rule in your relationship with the Lord. Think about that. If you withhold forgiveness from people, it damages your relationship with the Lord. If you forgive people, it improves your relationship with the Lord. This is simple. A better way of putting it, look at verse 13, James chapter two. For he shall have judgment without mercy that hath showed no mercy. And mercy rejoices against judgment. The Bible says in Hebrews 12, 6, the Lord loveth, whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth. So the Bible here is saying is that if you were merciful towards people, God will be merciful towards you. What does that mean? He'll be more lenient to you. He'll literally grant you more leniency. Isn't that true of a parent? Isn't there situations where you come down hard on your children and situations where maybe you're more lenient in those cases? And doesn't it have to do with how they have been in the past? A parent just as God can be more lenient with us or more strict with us, with the chastening that he will deal. And look, the Bible turned to Ephesians four.  That's not a place I wanna be. So that's an important prerequisite to the sermon this morning.  That's somebody that just has no mercy.  This is like a wife that is mad at her husband and doesn't talk to him for days. That's no mercy. That's not forgiveness. Look at Ephesians chapter four. Look at verse number 26. This is a man that struggles. Look, men will struggle with this. This is a man that holds a grudge right here. It depends, look, your mercy that you will receive from the Lord depends on you not, you getting that right, getting that fixed. Look at Ephesians four, 26. The Bible says, be angry and sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Meaning, meaning, it doesn't say, look, here's the thing. Even people, I haven't listened to my red-hot sermon. But a couple of people said to me today, like, man, you really got upset this morning. And they're like, I don't have an anger problem. Okay, but if you don't get angry at things, you are not a man. If you're this kind of person that just nothing makes you angry, you are not a man. That's the problem with this country, there's no men. That's the problem with it. You think we'd be where we are today if men got angry, no way. I'm getting angry now, so. Anger's not bad, but don't sin while you get angry. That's what the Bible is saying here. It says, be angry.  The wicked should make you angry. Haters of God should make you angry. Things that are going on in this country should make you angry, but sin not.  Let not the sun go down upon it. You wanna have a good relationship with your wife, a good relationship with your husband.  Work it out. Let it hang for days and days and days. But if we are unforgiving people, we are unmerciful people, that's not someone somewhere that we wanna go because we will receive no mercy from the Lord. So the conclusion of the intro is this. It's a simple one, is that our reaction to unforgiveness to other people can improve or damage our relationship with our Heavenly Father. All right, now, what's the sermon about this morning? You say, someone did me wrong, I forgave, I let it go, I'm good at this, pastor. I don't even think I need to hear this message. Well, here's what you need to understand. Just because somebody did you wrong and you forgave, and maybe they do you wrong again and again and again, and you are really good at being merciful and really good at forgiving, that doesn't mean that that relationship is whole. And that's what we're gonna talk about this morning.  They said that they would do one thing and they didn't do it. You say, I had some guy from church, I just made this up, so if this has happened, I'm sorry. I had some guy, a brother remodeled my kitchen and he said he was gonna do it one way and he just didn't do it the other way. And whatever, I first Corinthians six that thing. I took the loss, I suffered myself to be defrauded. And I truly did. I let the money go. I had somebody else come in and fix all the stuff, the way it was supposed to be fixed. And I just, I really let it go. I did my job according to the sermon this morning. That doesn't mean I'm gonna hire that person to remodel my bathroom. Certain people you will find that you need, it doesn't mean if I borrow money to somebody and they never pay me back, then who's gonna keep borrowing money to somebody? It doesn't mean that that relationship will be whole. Even if I've done my job. As a matter of fact, especially with our brothers and sisters in Christ, you will find that with some people you probably have to set some boundaries. In order to what? In order to protect what remaineth of that relationship. In order to make sure that there doesn't become bitterness or a grudge that sets in to protect yourself. To protect against future confrontation. Okay, I forgave him but I just don't invite him over anymore cause like half the time he doesn't show up. You know what I mean?  They've spent hundreds of dollars on you. And you know, food's expensive today. They've spent hundreds of dollars on you and you're just like, what kind of etiquette is that? Well first of all, common courtesy is not common anymore. That's another free tip. We need to teach our kids common courtesy. Free to teach our kids, I don't care what is accepted today or not. We need to teach our boys when they see a door, they open it for a lady.  You eat every bit of it. And don't say a thing. I would have been killed if I went somewhere. And somebody put a plate of food in front of me and I was like, I don't like that. I would have never done that. I would not be standing here today. We need to teach our kids to greet people. We need to teach our young men to walk up to a man and shake his hand and look him in the eye. And not talk to people by staring at your shoes. We need to teach these things because they're not common anymore. They're not gonna learn these things from other people that they meet because these things are going away. But the point is, back to the sermon, that the one-way street is necessary for our relationship with the Lord. But if you want to have a complete relationship with your brothers and sisters in Christ, they're a good, powerful relationship. Look, this one-way street thing doesn't work well with a marriage because you can't just say, okay, every time I talk to my wife, she offends me so I'm gonna stop talking to her. That's an extreme example, but you see where I'm going. Relationships can get damaged and damaged and damaged over time. For that matter, I mean, relationships with close friends. You're just not gonna be closer friends if you have to keep setting these boundaries with people. So you say, I want good friends and I want a great marriage. That should be what we all want right there. So here's what you need to learn to do in your life. You need to learn to say, I'm sorry. Say, wow, what in the world? How many people in this room, I'm gonna take a poll, how many people in this room know people or know someone that either will never say they're sorry or has an extremely difficult time saying that they are sorry? Raise your hand, look around. It's difficult for people to say, I'm sorry. But if you cannot say, I'm sorry, that's what second Corinthians chapter seven, you see that word come up again and again. Sorry, sorry, sorrow. Sorrow means that you are sorry. This is a major problem for people. Turn to Proverbs chapter 16 and that's the title of the sermon this morning. I'm sorry. You say, why? Why is it so hard for people? Let's look at why first. Why it's so hard for people to say, I'm sorry. This one might be harder for men. I don't know that for a fact, but maybe I know more men that have a problem with it than women, but I know more men anyway. So anyway, it's hard. It's hard for some people. I literally know certain people that people will tell you I've never heard them say sorry. They've never apologized for anything ever. There's two reasons for it. The first one is this, look at Proverbs 16 and verse number 18. The first one is pride. The first one is pride. We'll look at the causes of the problem and then we'll look at how to fix the problem. Look at verse number 18. It says pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall. You say destruction of what? Everything. Pride destroys everything. In the case that we're talking about this morning, it's gonna destroy your friends.  In the case of never being able to say I'm sorry. Look at first John chapter one and verse number nine. First John chapter one, verse number nine. It's a hard thing for people to do. It's a hard thing for a prideful person to say I was wrong. I am sorry about that. That's a hard thing. Pride puts you in a really weird place. Look at first John chapter one. Look at verse number nine. The Bible says if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Go to James chapter five in verse number 16. Notice how it says confess. That's talking about you with God but it's saying you know what? You should say it. It's talking about you should say that you've done these things. You should say you're sorry. Amen. It's important you should confess them. James five, 16. This one is really twisted into some weird stuff today too. But look at James chapter five in verse number 16. The Bible says confess your faults to one to another and pray one for another that you may be healed. The effectual prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Look that doesn't mean like hey go after church today and tell everybody in the church every sin that you've ever done. That's not what that means. It doesn't mean like you know let's have a sin competition after church. What that is saying is confess your faults one to another meaning the faults that you've done to somebody. Like I brother I faulted you. That's what that's saying. It's saying you faulted someone. Go and tell them that you're sorry that you did it. That's summed up right there. Doesn't mean you have to go talk to a priest. It doesn't mean that you know you have to just get into all this weird stuff. It's just talking about confessing saying to the person that you faulted that you were acknowledging that. That's what I'm sorry does. It acknowledges that what? That fault. Why? Why should you do that? That you may be healed.  It really boils down to that. Look at Isaiah chapter one. Go to Isaiah chapter one. I mean this is Isaiah chapter one kind of shows us the seriousness of not doing this. But look, it comes from pride. That's the first thing. That's the first place it comes from. Pride will cause you a lot of problems in your life. This is just one of them. One of them. Look at verse 15. Bible says, And when you spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. I'm sorry, Isaiah chapter one in verse number 15. And when you spread forth your hands I'll hide mine eyes from you.  This sounds like a place we don't wanna be with the Lord where he's not hearing our prayers. Where he's hiding his eyes from us. It kind of sounds like we've gone down that road. I was talking about a few minutes ago. It says wash you, make you clean. Put away the evil of your doings from before in my eyes. Seize to do evil. Learn to do well. Seek judgment. Relieve the oppress. There's that mercy. Judge the fatherless. Plead for the widow. Come now and let us reason together. Sayeth the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow. Though they be red like crimson they shall be as wool. If what? It's got a condition. Look at this. If you be willing and obedient you shall eat the good of the land. The land always came with. Always came with a condition. But if you refuse and rebel this is really the point I'm trying to get at right here is verse number 20. It says if you refuse and rebel you shall be devoured with the sword for the mouth of the Lord has spoken it. Not confessing, not confessing to the wrong that you've done. God is looking at that as rebellion. Rebellion is as witchcraft. The Bible says. So if you are this type of person that is so prideful that you can't admit that you've done wrong God looks at that as rebellion. That's serious. That's very serious. It all boils down to this. Someone who could not say they are sorry is a very prideful person and they will destroy the relationships around them. I mean ultimately they're showing that they just can't be trusted in that area, in this area, in this area, in that area. Even if that person forgives them as they should. I mean because like why? Because I mean obviously if I'm doing something I'm borrowing something and I'm just being defrauded again and again that person can't be trusted. Why? Because they don't say they're sorry that tells me that I don't need that to beat them down. It just tells me that they don't even know that they did wrong. And it's just going to happen to me again. Would that be responsible of me as someone that provides for my family to just be constantly giving hundreds of dollars to someone who just never like pays it back and I'm sorry kids you can't eat because I'm keeping borrowing money to someone that can't be trusted. It's a problem. Those boundaries need to be set. They're saying they'll do it again is what they're saying by not saying I'm sorry. I mean you could be someone. Think about a husband and a wife. Think about a husband and a wife in a marriage.  You're like I will never get divorced. I will stay married until the day that I die and I will, I'm just this, I'm a man of my word and I will never ever get divorced and maybe you're a woman that says the same thing and maybe that's the case and God will help you that that's the case but that doesn't mean that you'll have a good relationship. You know a marriage can be in my opinion the greatest blessing that you will receive on this earth. A marriage and children. But that need, that relationship needs to be protected. That relationship needs to be protected from these types of things, these little things that chip away at it. Over 10 years, over 15 years, over 20 years. You see somebody that is divorced after 20 years or divorced after 15 years. I was a young man and I used to drive to work with this man that was about 15 years older than me and he ended up getting a divorce after about 15 years of marriage and I remember thinking to myself, oh my goodness, when am I in the clear on this thing? The point is that that problem didn't start in that 15th year. They slowly whittled away their relationship until both of them or one of them decided to be divorced, which is wrong all the time. But it doesn't guarantee just because you will never get divorced, doesn't guarantee, you're not guaranteed a great relationship with your wife or with your husband. Your goal should be to have a better relationship with your wife every single day. That's a good goal for a married man. And vice versa. Turn to 2 Samuel, chapter six. Actually, don't turn there, but I mean just 2 Samuel, chapter six. I mean, we see the story of Michael and David. Actually, go ahead and turn there, let's go there. Look at 2 Samuel, chapter six. Look at 2 Samuel, chapter six. Just because you're married doesn't mean you're gonna have a great relationship for the rest of your life. Look at 2 Samuel, chapter six. Look at verse number 20. 2 Samuel 6, verse number 20. The Bible says, David returned to bless his household and Michael, the daughter of Saul, came out to meet David. He was dancing and coming back in with the ark. And, you know, his wife was jealous and she didn't like what he was doing. And she says to him, she says, how glorious was the king of Israel today who uncovered himself today in the eyes of the handmaidens of his servants and one of the vain fellows, shamelessly, as one of the vain fellows that shamelessly uncovered himself.  And, you know, you could say, she's right to be upset if a husband was doing that. I mean, I'm not even faulting her for what she said, but it just starts this war here between these two in the next couple of verses. Like, instead of just being like, sorry about that.  Look at this in verse 21. He says, David said unto Michael, it was before the Lord which chose me before thy father. Look at that. He's like, before all his house to appoint me ruler over the people of the Lord, over Israel, therefore I will play before the Lord. And I will be more vile than thus. And I will be base in my own sight and of the maid servants which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be head in honor. Oh. And look what happened to the relationship. Therefore, Michael, the daughter of Saul had no child under the day of her death. I mean, essentially that was the end of, from what we know, the end of their physical relationship as a husband and a wife. So, the person is people, you're not guaranteed to have a great relationship with people in your life.  You're not gonna have good friends. You're not gonna have a good marriage even if you stay married. Now turn to 2 Corinthians chapter 7. So pride is the first cause. Pride is the first cause. The second one is worse though. The second reason that people can't say they're sorry, this one is particularly bad. And 2 Corinthians chapter 7 is gonna give us some advice on how to fix that. The second reason that people don't, won't, or I don't even wanna say can't because everyone can. But the second reason that people won't say they are sorry is because they don't think it was that bad or they tried to downplay what they did. You say why is this one that bad? I'm gonna try to explain it to you. I brought an object lesson. This one is particularly bad. People that try to play down sin in their life or try to convince other people that sin is not that bad. Especially the sin that they're into or the sin that they did. You need to learn to let go of bad ideas in your life. This is, this is, this should be, I should just preach the sermon on this. As soon as you know something is a bad idea, you can let go of it, just get out of it. As fast as you possibly can. You'll be better off. The quicker you can do it, you can graph it. The quicker you can do it, the less the consequences will be. You need to get rid of bad ideas in your life as soon as possible. I went toy shopping yesterday. I haven't been toy shopping in like the little kids section for like a long time. Toys are getting weird. I went toy shopping yesterday and I bought, I was looking for the, I was looking for the toy, you know the box that you buy that's got the shapes? Like the circle goes in the circle and the square goes in the square and all this stuff. I mean, the closest I could find is this thing to demonstrate my point. Can you explain to me, this isn't part of the sermon. Can you explain to me what shape that is? What are we trying to teach kids here? There's not even a, I played with this last night for a while in the hotel room and you kind of can flip it around like this and I'm like, I'm flipping it around. And I'm like, there's not even a triangle. I mean, how are you going to learn how to build something if you don't know what a triangle is? Oh, the men are like, yeah. But hanging onto bad ideas, hanging onto bad ideas is like literally is literally like trying to, you know, it's the, it's the philosophical, they didn't even have a round peg. It's the philosophical trying to put a round peg in a square hole, trying to hang onto a bad idea, trying to justify that something wasn't that bad. You're just like, you're trying to cover it up, cover up what you did, you did something wrong. Maybe if I do this, this and this and this, not that many people will know about it.  That's what you're trying to do. People that, this is why this one is so bad.  So what do they do? They try to justify the sin. They try to do all these things. And you know, they're stubborn. They can't fit it in there, but you know what they do? They pull out this. And here's the thing, they don't step back. They don't step back and they don't say, hey, you know what? This thing didn't come with a hammer.  I do that a lot. If someone cross threads a bolt and they don't cross thread the bolt, they cross thread it all the way in. Like they must have went and they must have got a pipe and put a pipe on the wrench and they cross thread that inch and a half bolt all the way in there. Into the head of the motor. I'm like, what are you thinking?   I know this didn't come with a hammer, but if I just knock off some edges here, they're like, well, that still didn't work. They don't think about the fact that why am I using a hammer? Maybe I should step back and think about what I'm doing. And then you get the self-destructive person. Right, they're just going down with the ship. And what do they do?   What shape is that? Sorry, you gotta let go of bad ideas as fast as you possibly can. This is true in so many different areas of your life and it is certainly applicable to hanging onto and defending sin in your life. I've found in my life, just like my work life, just like in the last 20 years, I think that, look, I think that if you're a man and you have a job and you like to have ideas that work and things like this, to myself I've found that about one in 10 ideas are good from myself.  No, but I found that about one, it doesn't mean that all nine were completely bad, but the problem is, you think of an idea and then it turns out that it's, oh, it's just too expensive to build.  You know, I thought this thing could pay itself back in two years, but you know, the calculations show that it's really not what I thought it was gonna be. You just gotta let it go as quick as you can. Why? Because you could just lead yourself down this path of destruction. If you just hang onto these bad ideas. It's not, I mean, the trick, the trick to be successful in your life is not having 10 out of 10 good ideas. It's being able to let go of the nine very quickly. That's the key, that's the same thing with sin.   You see the sin and look, you read the Bible, you hear the preaching from the Bible, you're good at the Bible, the sin's gonna be exceedingly sinful to you. You're gonna know it's there. As soon as you see it, you let it go. You get rid of it as fast as possible. You don't hang onto these bad ideas. Hanging onto sin is a terrible idea every single time, and that's what people that can't say, I'm sorry, are doing. They are hanging onto ideas and then they try to ram the idea in and try to convince people who they convince, no one. And they try to take a bigger hammer and they smash things and they do more damage and more damage and more damage. This is science today, by the way. This is science today. Science today, I mean the perfect example of somebody that just hangs onto a bad idea and then just tries to ram everything into that bad idea is science today. I was just reading something, this is coming, you're gonna see this, but I don't know why I pay attention to astronomy and all these different like physics and things like that. I just read a paper from Ottawa University the other day that the big bang is like this. The big bang theory, right? The big bang theory that's taught as fact. Science is supposed to be you have an idea, kids listen up, this is science, you have an idea, a hypothesis, and then you do a bunch of experiments and tests and you see if that idea was right. And if it's not right, you run away from that idea and you go come up with another idea. But instead, the big bang theory is perfect for this. What they do is the universe, the universe is 13 point something billion years old. This paper that I just read said, oh, we missed it by 14 billion years, it's 27 billion years old. It's real, it's coming, you're gonna see it. You're gonna see it, it's coming because they have a space telescope now, they used to have the Hubble Space Telescope, they used to orbit the Earth, they sent another space telescope up like a million miles away from the Earth and it orbits the sun, it's called the Webb Telescope. And now what they're seeing is they're looking at these universes and they're measuring the light coming back from these universes. They think that they can tell how old the universe is by the red shift and the light, but they're seeing these universes that are only 300 million years away and they look like they should be much, much older. So instead of like taking their, instead of stepping back and being like, this toy didn't come with a hammer. What do they do? They're like, we're gonna need some more billions of years. I mean, folks, somebody that's like, I'm sorry, the answer wasn't 14, it's 27. You can't be trusted. And they're gonna make the Earth older, I haven't read that this has come, but they're gonna do that too. Because like evolution is mathematically impossible. So what do we need? We need some more, we need some more billions. But what they're doing is they're just, they got this bad idea and they're just gonna, they're gonna ram that round peg into that tiny little square hole, no matter what. Back to the point of the sermon. Saying you're sorry is doing the same thing. Not saying you're sorry is doing the same thing.  It's probably, it's not even really sin. You shouldn't even be so mad about that. What's the big deal? It's hanging on to a bad idea. Get rid of it as fast as you possibly can. Eventually you hang on to bad ideas, you're gonna get burned completely.   Turn to 2 Corinthians chapter seven, I think you're there. And by the way, by the way, this is something that if your kids do, you need to take very seriously. If your kids will not admit something, that is something that I have always taken very seriously. Look, there's times when I come home from work and my wife's like, I won't name names, my kids don't like when I name names. But they're like, you know, so and so did this.  He chased the cat with some remote control thing or something, you know? It's like, that's not like something that, we don't want that happening, but if kids will not admit to fault, if you know that they did something wrong and they're trying to cover it by lying or justifying it, that is a serious thing. That is a serious thing that needs to be taken care of when they're five, because you do not want an adult like that. Because if they do not handle that when they're five, you're gonna have an adult that can't have a good relationship in a marriage. This is how serious you need to take these things. Whenever my kids knowingly lied to me, it didn't happen much because when it happened, I brought the world down on their ears. That's how serious it needs to be taken. Because it's a major character flaw. It's, look, I'm not saying kids won't do it. My kid did it, it's something. No, it's, kids, they all do it. You have to take it very seriously so it doesn't become something they do. Look at 2nd Corinthians chapter seven. How do we fix it? Here's the importance of it. Here's the importance of it. 2nd Corinthians chapter seven uses the word sorry several times. Look at verse number 10 of 2nd Corinthians chapter seven. Seven. The Bible says for godly sorrow, worketh, repentance, the salvation, not to be repented of, but the sorrow of the world worketh death. Now the answer is really in verse number 11. For behold, this self-same thing, that ye sorrowed after a godly sort. That's what we're looking for in our lives. When we've messed up, when we've done someone wrong, we are looking for that sorrow. We should have sorrow of a godly sort. And then the Bible, being the Bible, gives us great detail on what this godly sorrow actually looks like. I mean, thank God that he is so detailed in the Bible for us. What carefulness. Look at these things that he talks about. He says it will make you more careful. If you are somebody that can do something wrong, you know what sin is. You know what sin is and you have the character to not hang onto sin or try to justify that sin. You know the Bible. Sin's exceedingly sinful. You know you've done wrong. And look, 99% of people when they've messed up, they know they did wrong. Whether they'll say it or not, they know it.  You're gonna be careful next time. You say, why would rot carefulness in you? Because you know what? Going up to somebody and saying I'm sorry is embarrassing. It's embarrassing. We're gonna talk a little bit about another word tonight, but it's shameful. It's supposed to be. Why? So you're careful. So you don't keep somebody that is good at saying I'm sorry is generally somebody who is good at not repeating the same mistake. Because it rots carefulness in you. Because saying you're sorry is not fun. Admitting to your husband or admitting to your wife or admitting to your friends. I'm sorry I did that bad horrible thing to you. It's shameful. It's hard. It's painful to do. This is why people don't do it. But you'll be careful. Look at the next word. It says what clearing of yourselves. I'm sorry, it clears you. It fixes the relationship. You got the forgiveness on one side and you got the godly sorrow on the other side. It clears it up. This is what needs to happen. And look, the Bible, if you put this together with what we looked at about being angry and sinning not and letting not the sun go down on your wrath, meaning this, all these things should take place in the same day in your marriage. It's just like I forgive you. I'm sorry I cleared up within a few hours of the offense. Look at this now. What indignation? This is a personal one, right? Like what indignation meaning I'm upset at myself that I did this. I'm literally angry that I did this. Again, another thing that is gonna protect you against going and just repeating that same thing. Verse number, what vehement it says, what indignation, ye what fear. Again, talking about that carefulness, that fear of God, what desire, what vehement desire, that zeal, that effort to prevent future occurrences. And then again, this one here it says what revenge? Meaning I'm on the Lord's side and Satan's not gonna take me down again. Just this strong feeling of it's embarrassing to say sorry on purpose.  Look, then and only then, look at the last part of this, it says in all things you have approved yourselves to be what, to be clear in this matter. Then and only then will the issue be clear after this process goes through. Only then will the relationship between the husband and the wife, the person in the church, your neighbor be completely restored after this happens.  You know you're wrong. We should all practice, the men only because the women can't speak in church, but let's all practice. One, two, three, I'm sorry. See, was that so bad?  Here's the last one I wanna bring up. You should even say sorry to your kids if you have to. You're like what? I'm a perfect parent, I never make mistakes. Let me ask, hopefully somebody else has done this.  You ever execute an innocent victim? I haven't done that a bunch, but I have done that. And you know what I did after I did that? I said I was sorry. I mean it's possible, even as your kids, most of my kids are getting older now. And here's what's gonna happen when your kids get older. They're learning the Bible, they're gonna know the Bible really well. Your kids are gonna know when you mess up, even before you feel like you have something to apologize for. And you need to get those things right because this is why the Bible talks about you know it's possible to provoke your children to wrath. So you're gonna, there's no downside to come into a church like this, but this is something you need to be aware of as these kids are learning the Bible. And when you get in the flesh, and guess what? They're learning the Bible and they're living with you the whole time. So when you get in the flesh and you do something wrong or I mess up as a husband, they know it. I don't have to tell them, they know it. And if something happens where I do something as a father, you always happen, this happens to me. It happens to all of us. You should get things right with everybody. I'm sorry kids, I should not have been upset that I should not have spanked so and so. It was his buddy or whatever. And just get things right. And just as soon as you know that you've done something wrong, let it go. Clear it up with everybody. Just be like this, I'm sorry machine. But then let's be upset and like try to like, cause you don't want to be this moron that's going around apologizing to everybody either every day either. So you know, have that revenge, that indignation and you'll get things right. Because if you don't ever say you're sorry folks, you don't ever think that you do wrong. You don't ever admit wrong.    It's all possible though. I'm sorry, it's a powerful thing. Be sorry, say sorry. Let's power head and have a word with him.


Following the spate of violence and criminality across the country, a group known as Southwest Women Arise for Nigeria have called on women as mothers of the nation to arise to the clarion call of setting things right. Plus TV Africa's correspondent Destiny Mormo has more. According to this group, the peace enjoyed by communities and nations supersedes every other thing. These women say they have decided to silence the drum of war being beaten by some unscrupulous elements. The co-convener Bolanle Ido and other speakers say insecurity is grossly the bane of development, hence women can play a vital role to combat. The women have come together today to talk about Nigerian unity. We are for Nigerian unity. We are not for division. For 2023, we cannot divide. If your BP is normal in Nigeria, you are not normal. That's just the truth. The rape ourselves, our women, our husbands, our sons are not let out.  Some of the speakers blame women identifying docility as a factor. The transformation can be instantaneous. That's impossible. The rot is not instantaneous. It's been over the years that things have been going bad and we've kept quiet. So the change also towards a better Nigeria is going to be one day at a time. Others said because of the stake they have, they cannot watch things fall apart where the center cannot hold. This, they say, they will be active in the next election by supporting a competent hand to stem the tide. Honours of the peace of this country lies in the hands of women. And we need to take that mantle to say we've had enough of bloodshed. Yaya Bello is one of the governors who have been very supportive of our cause, irrespective of what tribe you are. Someone made mention of Governor Yaya Bello this afternoon. And when we look at it, he's a very young man that came up on board. He cleaned up the civil service payroll. He had done so much for the youth in Kogi States. According to them, women and children are greatly affected during unrest. They say it is time to groom good leadership skills in their sons, husbands and also among themselves. Destiny Momo for Plus TV Africa.


Our next speaker is born and raised in Germany. He lives and works as a PhD student in Canada, as a member of a research group on extremist politics and democratic systems. And he'll give us an insight into the public discourse in Germany focused on the so-called Alternative for Deutschland. Please welcome Alexander Bayer. Thank you very much. Thank you people for showing up in the Zalborg. Thank you to the internet for watching. Very big thank you for the organizers for giving me the opportunity to give this little talk. Yeah, my name is Alexander Bayer. And everywhere I went this winter, I didn't have to wear a winter jacket because the temperatures were very mild. And I will tell you in a minute why that matters. As already said, I'm a member of a research group in Vancouver, where we look at what happens how extremist parties and politics fair in democratic systems. And we decided to focus this research project on the fascinating for researchers fascinating case of Germany and asking the questions if we can point fingers. And is it a valid judgment to say the media, the media is to blame for the rise of the AFD. For anyone who decided at the end of 2017 that they would spend most of 2016 in hibernation, which seemed like a pretty good idea at the time, I will give a quick rundown what happened. So we had an election in September. And the domino piece that was Germany fell domino piece in a sense that all around in Europe far-right parties had considerable success in the past, in the recent past. And Germany was the last stalwart in Central Europe where a far-right party did not get into government. This happened in September. And it did not only get into parliament, it also the way that it looks like now it might become the official leader of the opposition. So when these results came in, pundits were really, really quick to call the shots. The dominating sentiment was that it was the media's fault. They took the positions of the AFD and gave disproportionate amounts of coverage to this far-right extremist party. And this sentiment had a lot of truthiness to it. So it had a lot of, yeah, sure, I can see why that. Everyone that opened this newspaper or opened a news website, stories about the AFD seemed or about something that's related to the AFD seemed to dominate coverage. This went along with a little bit of a felt truth, a truth that was perceived by people about how the campaigning season was a lot of season and not a lot of campaigning, despite Martin Schulz's best efforts, a whole lot of sunshine, but not a lot of conflict. And this was something that then was perceived to be very, well, I don't want to say very skillfully, but somehow filled by the AFD and the topics that are of concern to this party. So what are we doing today here? First off, I'm a political scientist by trade and political scientists like theory. I know that this is an event where theory might not at the forefront of everyone's minds, but it is for me, because talking and arguing to political scientists about theory is like mud wrestling with a pig.  So I'll have one slide on what previous theories would suggest have happened and how it could have happened. Then I'll show you what kind of data we have collected to systematically answer this question and talk about public discourse in Germany, then to the meat and potatoes of the talk about how the campaign unfolded in the media. And then to end, I will show some more data that is a bit different that paints a picture on why this election was a special election and why it was sort of a perfect storm of an election for a far-right party and why this actually makes us claim that the media could be said to have behaved pretty reasonable as a little teaser. OK, theory, one slide. Two possible mechanisms of media effects. There is this normative, very endearing and wonderful idea that if you read something and someone carefully crafts and he or she constructs an argument that is well-written, well-made, you read this, you take it in, you're persuaded by that regardless of what this argument is. 60 years of media research suggests that this doesn't happen. Pre-existing opinions are extremely difficult to change in each and every single one of us, even though we're likely to admit that, no, no, no, sure, I'm a rational thinker. I take standpoints if they're convincing to me and I internalize them, but it's not how this works. The second possible effect and the one that will be of concern to us today at the core of the presentation is something that's called priming. So the media can't tell people what to think, it can't persuade people independently of the previous opinions that people have, but it's really, really successful in telling people what to think about. It's super good, the media is super good. Reading something is very effective in bringing something to the front of your mind. And here I can tell you why I told you about my choice of attire in winter. The vast majority of you probably thought when I said this, oh, I don't know if it's winter jacket. Wow, who is this guy? But maybe a few of you thought, yeah, sure, it was pretty mild, that's climate change. So without naming the issue, there's a chance that I primed a few of you to consider climate change and pull that in your frontal lobe at the front of your mind. And this is important, this is the central thing that we have to consider if we ask if the media wrote up a party like the AfD. Also important to consider here is that priming is easier or there's an indirect effect of priming as well where a topic that is owned by a specific party, that's the thing that then favors the party subsequently. So if the media writes a lot about refugees, a xenophobic far-right party that has this problem of refugees at the core of their agenda will reap in benefits in our minds, in that its agenda will fall on fertile to our ground. So far, the theory, that's all. So what do we do based on this theory? We collected data, lots of data. We have, we understand this data to be, we understand this text that we collected to be data and we use natural language processing to analyze it. Natural language processing basically means that we're giving language to a computer that wasn't written specifically to be understood by a computer and try to extract meaningful analysis based on what the computer is doing with this. So we use some sifting methods to collect about 8,500 articles from four central German news websites, Fokus, Bild, Welt, and Spiegel and we have that results in a unique data set that to our knowledge, no one else has. If so, please reach out to us. And this data set is so unique that it deserves at least six fire emojis. It is also pretty exciting because that was pretty cheap. We were two people that were many concerned with collecting this data and I don't wanna calculate my hourly wage but it was almost done with no financial expense. And this is cool because we're social scientists, we're faced with this problem with this very interesting case of Germany sort of falling in line, very delayed with lots of other countries around it in terms of the foreign party getting their scenes in parliament and we can use methods that are available to us for sort of like sitting down and reading a stack overflow and teaching those methods to us to systematically try to answer this question. Let's dive right in. The share of party mentions in online news. So what we did for each day, we calculated what the total number of mentioned political actors is. We did that based on work lists that we carefully crafted that included candidates' names and party abbreviations and party names and things like Kanzlerin and Kanzlerkandidat for the CDU CSU and the SPD respectively and we let that thing rip through our little R script that we have. So the average of mentions of each party over the course of the campaign looks something like this. Between July 1st and September 24th, that's the timeframe that we concentrated on. We see a clear incumbency bonus, the Kanzlerkandidat bonus for the CDU CSU, social democrats, high 20s and the AFD at 10.7%. Here we might say at the smaller parties, a little note to the green and the left. So with this dictionary method, it's kind of tricky because we can't say, oh yeah, well we're just gonna count every occurrence of grüne and linke for the green party and the left party because then we get stuff like the green banana and the left hand that is counted for them. So that's why here we're only using candidates' names, that's why they probably, they sort of underperform but for our purpose of talking about if the AFD got favored by the media, we're sort of letting that drop out of the table. So the story here is over the course of the campaign 10.7% of mentions were happening that mentioned the AFD, basically case closed, right? AFD got 12.7% in the election. That doesn't really sound like it was favored by the media. And a few of you might know this, this analysis from a blog post that me and Konstantin Kurtz wrote for NetsPolitik sort of like 45 seconds after the election when we worked on truncated data and we also focused on print, on print media. And this is sort of what this graph looked like that we based our conclusion on AFD didn't really get any disproportionate amount of coverage. It actually is in the last week of the campaign, last week's of the campaign actually is outperformed by the FTP. Science is the current state of airing or the, so now that we have better data in terms of online news data, this whole story looks a bit different if we take the average over the whole course of the campaign and actually have it shown to us day by day. This is what I wanna focus on now. So just looking at the sort of tail end of this all the way to the right when we get close to the election date, the order of this is surprisingly close to the actual election results. The parties actually do get in in the order that they came out of the election. But we do see a little curve that gets closer to a curve that should be bigger. And this is where the, well, I don't wanna say magic but this is where the interesting stuff lies. So let's look at the curves one after the other. The CDUC is you as you would expect as the incumbent anything that is remotely political in domestic and international politics will score mentions for the chancellor and the CDUC is you. That's why this curve is considerably higher than the others but we do see a downward tendency the closer we get to the campaign when campaign coverage shifted from the incumbent to the competitors especially the underdog competitors which is kind of, that's a bad transfer to the SPD now but if we look at the curve of the social democratic party there's a slight bump around August and Martin Schultz really tried to drive home this issue of justice as the central campaign promise and there's another little slight hump around September 1st beginning of September when the televised debate happened but the overall trend is pretty linear it doesn't seem to be if we would just smooth this plot out to be a straight line it probably would be pretty much horizontal not so for the AFD so remember over the course of the campaign they got 10.7% on average of mentions and that's true if we calculate an average of that of course this looks like it scores considerably lower than the two major parties but something happens in late August and all of a sudden this party gets actually close to the social democrats starting in late August the tendency becomes one that is pretty considerably upwards and if we take the average of only the two last weeks before the election we get to a number of 19.6% of all mentions are talking about the AFD there which is something if we think about the mechanisms of priming those are short-term effects we're looking for things that happen over a short-term or have an effect in a pretty short-term so this is something that is extremely, extremely important at the beginning of this timeframe where the plot becomes something that has a trend that shows upwards around like August 28th where the first little mountain, first little summit occurs two things happened one, a refugee boat capsized in the Mediterranean an event that we sadly have to see terrifyingly often and 100 people died and the second thing that happened was that Alexander Gauland in an interview claimed that a German politician should be dumped in Anatolia and it's interesting if you talk about if you extract the topics that are covered in relation to the AFD before and after this moment before this August 28th it's a lot about Alice Weidl writing emails where it turns out she's not the public persona that she claims she is and it's a lot about internal rifts of this far-right party the internal tensions between the super far-right wing and the far-right wing and afterwards there's a surprising amount of citations of this oh, we should dump this person in another country so that's something that indicates that this strategy of sort of provoking a scandal paid off but before we get into that let's look into the topics that were covered over the course of the campaign we did the same thing we developed topic dictionaries with keywords for each category and we let our script read through all the data and count occurrences so looking at this we see a sort of band there in 10% rage where it's all a colorful rainbow where the topics don't really diverge from each other except for that topic of domestic security which is there at the low end of the range but we do have one topic that stands out quite considerably in the early months of the Vakam Sommar which is European Union general European Union topic this is because on July 1st Helmut Kohl, the eternal chancellor got the first European Act of State and a lot of things were written about his legacy in terms of the European Union and lots of people showed up from Strasbourg and Brussels and paid their respects this is why this topic seems like or this is why this topic comes in as strong as it does here another topic that has a sort of unusual curve here on our graph is the topic of the environment our dictionaries that we developed were topical and so what causes this steep, steep summit there in early August is the diesel Gipfel there the diesel summit where German car manufacturers tried to sort of get out of the fact that they basically ripped off customers with selling cars that emitted toxic amounts of poisonous gas and dust this is why this is extremely important in the low 40% range in early August but afterwards the trend line points steeply down a topic that was pretty consistent over the course of the campaign in its overall dynamic or at the sort of, not the overall dynamic but the role that it played is the topic of immigration and immigration means migration and refugees in our case here and now thinking about what that means in relation to our theory on priming we would think that, sure that's a topic that is owned by the AFD and it's super tightly connected to that party's rise so this is something that does favor a far right party like those are like it is but we can do a sort of more systematic investigation into this so this graph shows you the polls each dot represents polling results for the AFD and the line is the average out of those polls again over the course of the timeframe that we surveyed pretty much constant until mid-August and all of a sudden we have increasing variants and we have a tendency, a trend line that points upwards and now this is where the heart of the story lies is this, is this dependent on the mentions that the AFD got in the media this is the orange line now we have a different scale of our graph that's why it looks way more nervous than in the bigger one that we had difficult to say if you have data like this, time series data you actually wanna get rid of trends in terms of what the analysis should be like so one way to do this in a graphic representation is by not showing the absolute values and how they develop but only showing the change from day to day and plotting that this is what this graph does so here these two lines dance around the zero mark because especially the blue one where it's the polling results there wasn't a lot of variation from day to day it's an incremental steps that the curve points up and down it gets a bit more a bit higher in variants around after the mid-August and whereas the AFD mentions in the media they stay, well they stay rich in variants hard to tell if anything systematic is there you would think that after the sort of first third of August those lines are connected we ran an analysis, a vector order regression model time series statistics we couldn't find any systematic relation in a time frame that made sense for our theory on priming which is a few days that we're looking for so if you talk about time series we talk about lag and lead and so you try to connect a data point that is further down the line with a data point that is not as far down the line and nothing of statistical significance showed up here and this kind of stumped us we thought right when we looked at this there was something we sort of took a step back and we considered another possibility to as why to as to why the media reported as they did that the media just give the people what the people want it and here is why I want to talk to you about why this was a special election this graph I adapted this graph from the Berliner Morgenpost and they based it on surveys conducted by InfraRestimup onto the data I didn't have any access to but this impressively shows why there was a special election in five out of the six preceding elections employment was the topic that was on top of people's minds when they made the decision in terms of which party to vote for and employment means unemployment in 2017 with unemployment being at record lows and after 2015 having or having a Syrian civil war still going on having refugees come into into Western into Europe immigration jumps on out as the topic that was the most important for people and here if we look at also the the topics that are further down the important scale for voters those are all topics where one could conceivably think that those can be spun in a way that they are connected to this refugee situation social justice, economic injustice that's something that a party like the AFT can very effectively turn into an idea on group-based conflict it's us versus them same with pensions those people come here to take our jobs and our money and especially from the old people from our LED so 2017 the Bundestags war in 2017 is a special case if we consider it compared to other parties so now having this situation where we find that it's it's something that basically never happened in recent history in Germany before in terms of what made people decide at the polls we wondered, okay, well is there a way to more accurately measure this demand side of things this need for information for voters and what better way there is to measure the salians in the population than to look at Google queries so we collected Google trends data more specifically the Google searches and refugees, Flüchtlinge general term and again here's this way to even out a trend line this is the daily change in how this topic developed and if we put our daily change of AFT mentions over that we do see that there's something there there's some sort of systematic relationship and then crunching these numbers and putting them again through a vector order regression model we come to the conclusion that with a lag of only one day Google searches for refugees actually lead AFT mentions in the media so if on Tuesday a higher number of people in Germany Googled refugees on Wednesday the AFT was mentioned more often than the day before the end effect wasn't big but it was there and it was significant we also of course considered the alternative and the magic word is here it's granger causality so you can actually calculate and reliably calculate that the temporal succession means that one follows the other and so all of a sudden it becomes a bit difficult to point the fingers at the media because if the media just reacts to an interest it operates like a business if we like it or not there's the normative idea of the media especially in a country that is rich in high quality publications as is Germany that the media is a public good that educates people and brings out the best in them in challenging them and persuading them of the best side of the argument but at the end of the day in the online world it is a business with a measurable outcome you have clicks you have trackers you have ad durations that you can measure and so you can see which articles are favorite and which articles people people last the longest on and we're not saying this important important distinction to make here we're not saying that there's a direct causal link between people googling refugees and the media directly reacts to that prompt because there's some search engine optimization guy or girl every media publishing house that monitors what people are interested in we're saying that there's an intermediate step there it's not a direct cause it's just a sort of delay that is in there that allows for other mechanisms to get in so we're wondering what about the consumer focusing on the demand side and in 2017 there's a few things that you could actually look at to gauge what the demand side demands and we decided to focus on Twitter because without actually knowing this when we first started out with collecting all this data we decided to set up yeah to set up a Twitter scraper and that way between September 1st and September 24th we collected 4.5 million tweets that contained keywords that contained any one of a list of keywords that had that had political connotation so looking at this body of data we can extract things like the top 200 most used hashtags and if we do that and we count the tweets that contains one of the top 200 hashtags and we pay special attention to which one of these hashtags are decidedly pro AFD we get to a number that 30.9% of the tweets that contained any of those top 200 hashtags actually contain one that is in favor of the AFD whereas if we count the decidedly no AFD the anti AFD, no AFD in all ways of spelling and capitalization and so forth that's only 1.2% and here where it becomes here where it becomes a bit ticklish so in order to sort of give a better idea of what role Twitter might have played in our little relationship here between the demand side and the supply side the supply side supplying the news we have a beautiful network graph so this is a retweeting network this is we extract all the mentions of an actor each dot is a Twitter user each line is five or more retweets retweets, we're aware of that retweets don't automatically mean endorsement you might retweet something that is outlandish and crazy but for the sake of visualizing what the weights are on Twitter we're treating them as the same and anyone who ever has worked with network graphs of that size they take a long time to generate and it's kind of tough to label them so I'm very proud that I was able to do so if we look at this island down there that blob, that blue blob those are accounts that cluster around AFD accounts the coloring here was done by a by a walk trap algorithm I just adjusted the colors that that algorithm used to actually match the colors in the German party landscape and so we do have a a hefty continent at the bottom right that connects all kinds of people to the AFD there if you look at the little appendix below here that is colored in brown that is mainly organized around a movement called reconquista Europe which is an even further right wing right wing movement that is sort of like directly tacked to this island of the AFD and the the connecting node is Björn Hocker which is quite interesting so we have the AFD down there you have the other parties up there the rainbow that is the pluralistic political landscape we have those two extreme points they're at the super top right and they're at the bottom left that is those are very extremely extreme Twitter user parties that's the UDP and the Freien Wähler so they don't seem to engage with the nodes that are in the center here but what's also available to note is that for the other parties, for the established parties starting from the left and orange, the pirate party, and then red, the Social Democrats, purple, Stie Linke, green, grünen yellow, FTP and black the conservative party, CDU CSU all of these parties have a central node a central a central account around which a lot of other users are fanned out so there's, for each party, there's a smaller number or a relatively small number of accounts that are highly favored in how often they are retweeted AFD doesn't have that even so this is of course a projection of something that's three-dimensional and a two-dimensional place so there might be some screwing going on here in terms of how it shows on our screen but even turning it and trying to identify which party is at the center wasn't really possible so the internal rifts and the internal power struggles they do show in how how members of the party are are retweeted also interesting to note is which nodes which users are connecting these two continents, so to speak one is that blue dot is valrecht.de, a polling aggregator of course everyone is interested in getting their polling numbers out and that's tough to see here but there's a beige a beige user in the middle there which is valrecht.de so one of the media one of the media publications that we we actually collected data on and surveyed another thing that I'm just going to mention here briefly is that that light pink colored that light pink colored insert between the greens and the central gray beige dot those are Jan Bömermann die heute show in extra 3 yeah so there's a the dynamics are are clear that we have this this party that is pretty well organized in social media and and thus is able to to dominate a media agenda that is based on algorithms basically if you think about how how the logic of information dissemination works on Twitter with trending hashtags and if you have a party that is as as I don't want to say organized but as tightly clustered around itself within itself as the AFD shows up here and there's a good good chance that that will influence what all of us get to see when we check out the the Twitter the Twitter homepage and now I know that probably a good chunk of you have a burning questions in their mind and I'm going to going to want to know so how many of these of these bright blue bob blobs are bots a Twitter bots and we try to find that out using a tool called the botometer which is something that has an API available online where you can submit it's a project from from a research team in Indiana where you can submit the name of a Twitter user and then it gives you a it runs lots of lots of analyses and analysis lots of things about this user the frequency of tweets the time at which it tweets who is who is it following who is it followed by who is it talking to that kind of stuff and but when I try to submit that I broke their API and so if if there happen to watch I apologize that was me and so it wasn't be able to do some time but there's a bunch of talks tomorrow that talk about exactly about that things I'm happy to have this sort of as a lead in for for the day tomorrow so what can we what can we take from this a bundes talks about 2017 was a perfect storm for a far right party like the AFD yet a high issues aliens of the topic that is at the center of its agenda and you have a sort of unregulated wild west of off of social media uh... we'll see how that changes uh... with with recent law changes come into effect where all of a sudden the uh... the platform itself uh... has some liability to which kind of messages are spread but if that's effective for twitters uh... as a whole uh... other bag of worms so in that sense that's why I was sort of hinting at in in this issue environment we have people be interested in the topic that is central uh... for the party like the AFD is the media they have pretty surprisingly uh... uh... surprisingly predictable uh... and did not have at least for the for the topics before the for the for the publications that we covered uh... it did so uh... and it and for the context of where we're arguing here in uh... that's the AFD only gets like twenty percent of the share towards the end of the campaign is something that is a little bit surprising and that also leads into uh... into a different question of uh... what does this oh it's the journalist's fault actually mean what does it really mean this sort of is based on this normative expectation of the media being an impartial uh... an impartial uh... deliver of information uh... and if you think about what else is going on on the internet with alternative media and alternative news fear establishing itself uh... with news blogs like uh... well i don't wanna uh... i don't wanna call any names because as well as there's a there's a sort of scene of far right fringe blogs in in germany that we also collected uh... and so we're uh... further down the line we're gonna look at what the topics where they were covered in that uh... and how that connected to uh... to influencing public opinion uh... in in germany but having said this with these alternative ways of getting your news information uh... being available if you have the press if you have the mainstream press not covering a party like the aft to a certain extent you only give the fodder to those cries of lügenpresse uh... mandate mendacious press uh... in members of the of of the population that are sort of uh... at the risk of being lost as audience members so it's it's kind of difficult to call it to call the shots here and actually point the fingers at the media because they they delivered informing on an interest that existed in the pot in the population before they reported on something like the aft and with this i want to leave it at that i think you're very much for your attention uh... and i uh... i'm highly highly eager to hear uh... questions and prompts and ideas how we could pursue this feel free to attend microphones even the microphone i don't see behind the cameras let's start with number two should make some sound thank you thank you very much for your amazing work uh... i've got only one question do you plan on releasing those those collected data and what license uh... and that's a question that we uh... that we asked ourselves to uh... we would love to collect the data and ultimately it will happen when we have to make sure that we actually have the right to do so with the way that we collected it but we're definitely looking into that okay number five yeah you hello this is working uh... it's something i'm from the netherlands to compare these experiences with the aft with the experience in the netherlands you know we had wilders we had for donk we had for town uh... now we have both there and it seems that there is a major difference between the aft day because i presently i frankly i don't know the name of the leader of the aft it used to be frofoc pitri and now i don't know but the in the netherlands the leaders of the uh... those populist uh... right-wing parties they were they were very good in manipulating the media they were sending out messages is sending a kelder in germany what's the word like uh... the pro provocating is sending out provocations and that attracted attention of the media so there are people saying that you shouldn't react on all provocations anyway they were geared to draw attention and i wonder whether aft has been to the same extent active in the field of drawing attention purposely using even uh... uh... agencies that are specialized in advertising um... great question uh... there is this idea that the aft was very skillful at uh... sort of insinating scandal and and purposely doing things on a public stage that would draw attention to them uh... for example this uh... this uh... yeah i say it again this uh... uh... this uh... expression by alexander gaulan to dispose of a german politician uh... or uh... the other uh... leading candidate alice vital leaving a talk show uh... while it was being uh... broadcast um... so there is uh... there definitely is this is this element of the of actually taking a scandal and using it for your own for pushing your own agenda uh... whereas if they used uh... ad agencies for the media campaign uh... they did their campaigning was highly professionalized um... in terms of what their uh... uh... their posters were and how their campaign ads were worked uh... and they did work with a company that also was involved with donald trump's campaign uh... but uh... in terms of new media or online media it's not not that new anymore in terms of what they did on online media i mean i just only have an anecdotal sense if they use something like bots uh... which is also a way of uh... of buying uh... buying attention uh... i can i can sort of tell you about one specific case where we investigated which twitter users were the most active in tweeting on the aft on german twitter is tomorrow is a talk about a twitter user called ballerina which is um... which a name that has been out there which there's great indication that that is definitely a bot that has been planted and has been controlled by someone else uh... by uh... by sort of uh... by any group of actors that is not actually a ballerina uh... what we found was a twitter user called taylor tubby zero zero seven that tweeted in those three weeks that we surveyed six thousand five hundred times and mostly just retweeted uh... retweeted calls to go and cast your ballot that were all put out by the central aft accounts uh... and it didn't have a lot of followers like something five hundred or so but it just kept retweeting over and over and over and over and when we actually wanted to check out the page of that bot it was deleted the user was deleted uh... so there's a chance of your question um... this this high degree of personalization that's uh... the the patai for the friites has in the Netherlands is not as extreme and for the aft in germany because there's more leading candidates and there's internal rifts like it get rid of this is basically his own party uh... that's not the the same the strategy to use scandal to use something that is outrageous and push the boundaries a little bit more than jump back and say oh no we did not mean that at all in this way that is the exact same spot on strategy that is that perhaps i should add that bill was made it like many people queuing okay then i'll then i'll stop okay thank you we have questions from the internet then yes and qtg is asking why do you come to the conclusion that this was a special election while the last election austria has exactly the same issues don't you see this as some sort of an global effect uh... that's true a syrian uh... civil war that pushes people to flee from from war and save the livelihood is something that is not only felt in germany for the context of germany it's a special action that's this sort of situation is never uh... has never occurred in this way before but absolutely each election in europe basically since two thousand fifteen uh... was a special action in that sense but not in terms of the outcomes in a way that because foreign parties in other european countries already had uh... at their foot in the door and especially in austria where with the f uh... fpv were pretty well established with previously having been part uh... part of the government and now being part of the government again but for germany uh... in in what the issues were that were top of people's minds that's the special case that i meant okay microphone number three please thank you uh... first uh... i really appreciate the uh... sincerity and transparency of your talk thank you very much we need more of this in such circumstances and maybe less polemics sometimes um... there's just a little trifle in your method uh... where i was wondering how did you filter the linke and glüner stuff did you uh... did you yeah how exactly did you do it did you maybe count uh... all the dimensions of glüner uh... with the capital and non-capital g and linke with uh... capital l and non-capital and then filter it out further what did you do it uh... the other way around i know that you focus specifically on the aft stuff and uh... maybe you were focused on representing all the parties that might be relevant but uh... i would still be interested in that part thanks that's uh... uh... a great question um... the thing is that we used when we actually put all that would have to be collected text before we put it through the the unloading methods uh... we put it all into lower case just so we could have a consistent uh... way of analyzing um... and with capitalization sometimes it just trips up the way to treat this and that's why you ran through these issues with linke and glüner where we had to resort to only uh... taking basically the candidate's names and then also linke partai and grüner partai and a few conjugations so uh... dear linke partai right grammatically the cases we only like we conjugated them through uh... but yeah we since our focus was on the aft we weren't uh... we weren't especially concerned with that which is unfortunate i admit that uh... but for the purpose of this talk we decided to just use this to work around okay thanks microphone six please hello thanks for your interesting uh... presentation i'm wondering if you and your team uh... so you you looked at mentions of the different parties but i'm wondering if you looked at the content of the articles and how they talked about it if they were talked about positively or negatively thank you very much it's a great question that we actually did consider answer this question with a counter question as social scientists like to do uh... anyone in this room use amazon mechanical turk and works on hits to earn a few cents here and there no okay so i can speak freely there's a there's a method that uses uh... cheap labor on amazon mechanical turk and presents each worker with two sentences out of which they have to change the one that is more positive and and so we want to use this to train uh... a machine learning algorithm to actually get away to gauge the sentiment of positive and negative in the text that we had collected uh... we started that in early december and we we had a a workbook with four thousand so-called hits four thousand little jobs four thousand comparisons uh... and when this job was done uh... five or six days later uh... we we sort of put that through a test and compared it with our own hand coding that we had done um... and it turned out that one worker on amazon mechanical turk spent uh... over seven hours and worked of those four thousand little jobs that we had he worked three thousand nine hundred and eighty uh... and over one thousand four hundred of which he did in less than two seconds which is unfortunate because a this person uh... this person right person question mark probably used a script probably use the bot or just randomly clicked uh... the coding didn't match up at all with what we did hand-wise ourselves uh... uh... and that really screwed up our uh... our approach there uh... if any of you plan on uh... on doing some hits in the new year for amazon mechanical turk and you're asked to compare uh... two sentences that mention a political actor in germany uh... you can send me an email and maybe a screenshot and tell me how much you appreciate that we're paying six cents for each for each comparison uh... but that's uh... that's the story what we haven't we don't have any sentiment uh... in this analysis here in this context i'm very much a ghost of christmas future in your twitter data where you take retweets as well do you determine what are quotes and what are direct retweets because uh... in my experience and i work with this and then mark and in the u k a lot of people like to distance themselves from what the aft and similar saying by quoting everything they're saying and giving them the press uh... that's a very good point to make we did not make any any distinction between quotes and retweets but we did filter uh... based on five retweets by thinking okay if you occasionally uh... feel like you have to point something out that is outrageous and ridiculous that a person uh... uh... a member of a party says on twitter um... you would be inclined to do so less than a certain amount of time we also try to with other cutoffs the graph basically always look the same but if we think about what this means for for how the demand side is influenced it doesn't matter basically if if you're retweeting out of endorsement or out of uh... out of out of spite that's right uh... that's uh... that's the logic why we decided to to use mentions and retweets another question from the internet yes and new twenty threes asking do you think that the window of commonly acceptable ideas the so-called overtone window was shifted to the right uh... by the ideas of the aft echoed in the media uh... that's a good question that's a good question uh... something that comes to mind is that media uses epi-phenomenal uh... your sort of likely but the question is like do you think uh... does something happen in you because you use a certain media outlet or uh... do you use a certain media outlet because something happened in you uh... from the sense that i got uh... i would say that the the degree to what is what is acceptable definitely was shifted over the course of this campaign that all of a sudden we're questioning if remembering the holocaust should be uh... should be something that is uh... at the heart or very close to german identity that's something that uh... a political scientist would have never expected that this cleavage can be opened up again in a in a in a way that is so uh... so potent as it as it did now so it definitely did something to uh... to the overall discourse uh... in germany uh... whereas that is an effect of uh... of media reporting on the aft uh... would require us to use something like this the sentiment analysis to actually determine determine how the media talked about which aspect of uh... of the aft agendas i can see some movement behind microphone number eight i'm sorry i thank you very much uh... thank you for your work i still do have a critical question basically the things you showed is something like we all know yeah we could see this happening last year and so i mean this year in the last election so i'm wondering now whether the method you used which was basically focusing on quantity uh... is in a sort of mirroring what was happening and i'm wondering if you would work keep working on it all like you you used buzzwords and you use the media instead of like narrowing it down or more using most specific specific uh... questions and i was wondering if you have this with these results now and you have proof for them what are your next questions and how can you continue to use these uh... these this that the data you have to make it more specific so we can really have some outcome and some conclusions coming from this uh... it's an absolutely wonderful question um... of course we we thought about using this data further down the line uh... we our initial plan was to connect this uh... not just with salience data that we that we derive from google searches we also have uh... have facebook data that we collected that we want to look into but there it's a bit challenging to um... to actually uh... analyze uh... comments in depth onto language because language see uh... tends to be way more fluid and you have certain problems with uh... with selection and self-selection uh... so you really really have to be careful to cross connect which person that comments on facebook uh... is the same person and thus if you only do quantitative stuff uh... would would appear disproportionately uh... as i mentioned we have also collected data from from far right blocks from news blogs uh... that uh... that very actively endorsed the aft and their topics uh... and so we're planning to pull this into the analysis along with uh... data from the german longitudinal election study where uh... in this time frame that we serve it in the data each day uh... one hundred people in germany were called up and asked uh... about their feelings towards specific parties mention uh... actors so we actually have day by day uh... data once it comes out on uh... on how people what people thought about uh... those actors so we're planning to pull that in as a more reliable uh... measure for salience thank you very much i'm very sorry about times up so there will be no more questions right now in front of the audience alexander byer thank you very much a warm applause