ECREA16-Abstract

Friday, November 11

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Twitter as a Hybrid Space for Political Protest: Using the Quebec Maple Spring to Rethink Digital Activism Over Time

M. Lalancette

, V. Raynauld

, S. Tourigny-Kone

Universite du Quebec a Trois-Rivieres, Social communication, Trois-Rivieres Quebec, Canada

Emerson College, Communication Studies, Boston- MA, USA

This paper unpacks uses of social media-based activist communication throughout the 2012 Quebec student strike, also known as Maple Spring. This

mobilization initiative began in a fairly conventional manner when students from two large universities voted in favor of a strike against tuition hikes

in the province of Quebec, Canada on February 13, 2012. Over the following weeks, it quickly morphed into a decentralized, grassroots-intensive protest

movement. This paper focuses on how activists, protesters, and ordinary citizens - whether they supported or opposed the movement - turned to social

media to be active politically. Specifically, we explore the ways in which and to what extent this use evolved as the protest movement unfolded.We examine

how internal and external factors relating to the student movement shaped patterns of political engagement. From a broader perspective, we shed light

on Twitter-based dynamics of protest involving individuals and organizations at the edges of the formal political arena. In order to examine this dynamic,

we used the data mining and archiving platformTweet Archivist to collect and archive all 66,282 #ggi tweet with at least one #ggi hashtag - which refers to

the unlimited general student strike against the rise of university tuition fees in the province of Quebec, Canada - that appeared on Twitter’s public timeline

between April 22 and July 31, 2012. The #ggi hashtag quickly emerged as a tool for tweeters taking part or interested in the Maple Spring to circulate infor‑

mation or interact with each other.We narrowed down our sample by identifying 15 key days that deeply impacted the student movement for a wide range

of reasons (e.g. large demonstrations, decisions by student unions). Using these 15 key dates we explore the evolution of tweeting patterns between media

elites, activists, and ordinary citizens over the entire time period considered for this study. By taking interest in the evolution of#ggi tweeting over time, we

highlight and theorize on how social media is used for communication and organizing, shapes activist communication, and impacts logics of connective

action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2014). We conclude that Twitter was first used heavily for information dispersion, then political advocacy, and last for mobi‑

lization. These strategies evolved significantly as the strike stretched from days into weeks and the negotiations stalled. Activists modified their approach

on Twitter and focused more on direct attacks on politicians as well as turned their attention to media coverage of the events. Topics discussed ranged

from police violence, arrests, to government treatment of student representatives. Our interest in the evolution of #ggi tweeting over time (e.g. functions

of tweeting, topics discussed) is in line with what Hermida (2010) labels“ambient journalism”where citizens use Twitter as a media outlet to provide“their”

account of events. As Twitter became an important media tool for #ggi activists, it had shaping effects on protest action repertoires and the way in which

events were perceived by the public through patterns of framing, reframing and re-interpreting.

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Production, Propagation, and Protest: Visual Narratives of Blockupy Frankfurt on Twitter

L. Rossi

, C. Neumayer

, J. Vulpius

IT University of Copenhagen, Digital Society and Communication, Copenhagen, Denmark

Images play a central role in activists’ social media communication from protest events (Andén-Papadopoulos 2014; Mortensen 2013; Poell and van Dijck

2015), which has been conceptualised as eye-witnessing, counter-surveillance practices, or producing a visual alternative to the mainstream. Activists’

production and propagation of images through social media also raises critical questions about corporate social media shaping activist communication

and privileging violent narratives to produce visibility over other collective action frames (Dijck 2013; Fuchs 2012; Milan 2015; Poell and van Dijck 2015).

Despite the widely recognized centrality of images in activists’communication empirical studies based on social media data are rare. This article addresses

this challenge by analysing images (photos and videos) produced and propagated in the Blockupy Frankfurt protests against the opening of the European

Central Bank (ECB) headquarters in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on March 18, 2015. This research is the second phase of an analysis of Twitter data col‑

lected during the Blockupy Frankfurt action using event-specific hashtags (#Blockupy, #Destroika, #NoTroika) (Authors, 2016). Through a social network

analysis ofTwitter communication, the first phase produced two mayor results: it confirmed the relevance of visual content inTwitter propagation dynamics

(Suh et al. 2010) and it identified the central role of the official Frankfurt amMain police account. Based on these results, this research explores further how

different conflictual visual narratives produced by different actors emerge during the Bockupy Frankfurt protests on Twitter: Which different actors produce

and propagate different visual representations of the events? What are the visual narratives emerging on Twitter during the #Blockupy actions against

the opening of the ECB? To answer these questions, we followed a mixed methods approach to analyse visual content shared through Twitter messages

during the event.We ranked the tweets containing images and manually coded the most retweeted 1% (N=119) of the data-set.The manual coding aimed

at identifying the type of users (activists, media/journalists, politicians, police, others) who produced the tweet and the presence of violence in the visual

content.We further differentiate between two types of violence: explicit violence and latent violence (Fishman and Marvin 2006). A cross tabulation verified

the relationships between the type of user and the type of violence. In parallel we performed a narrative analysis of the images. Combining these two ap‑

proaches, we can preliminarily conclude that on social media, images of riots, peaceful protests, artistic action, as well as police and news media struggle for

public visibility. Different actors create parallel narratives representing a positive image of themselves by antagonising the other through visual narratives

of physical and latent violence (particularly in images posted by the police Frankfurt amMain but also by activists) as well as (in the case of the activists) by

a non-violent and colourful positive self-representation. Despite these non-violent narratives produced by activists we can observe a dominance of physical

and latent violence in reporting about protest events through visual content on Twitter (particularly by mass media but also all other actors).