To be or not to be Charlie: Twitter hashtags as a discourse and counter-discourse in the aftermath of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting in France

Giglietto, Fabio; Lee, Yenn

Abstract

Following a shooting attack by two self-proclaimed Islamist gunmen at the offices of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on 7th January 2015, there emerged the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie on Twitter as an expression of condolences for the victims, solidarity, and support for the magazine’s right to free speech. Almost simultaneously, however, there was also #JeNeSuisPasCharlie explicitly countering the former, affirmative hashtag. In this paper, we analyse 74,047 tweets containing #JeNeSuisPasCharlie posted between 7th and 11th January. Our network analysis and semantic cluster analysis of those 74,047 tweets reveal that the hashtag in question constituted a form of resistance to the mainstream framing of the issue as freedom of expression being threatened by religious intolerance and violence. The resistance was manifested through three phases: sharing condolences but indicating a reservation against the mainstream frame (Grief); voicing out resistance
against the frame (Resistance); and developing and deploying alternative frames such as hate speech, Eurocentrism, and Islamophobia (Alternatives). The hashtag in this context served as a vehicle through which users formed, enhanced, and declared their self-identity.

Citation

Giglietto, F., & Lee, Y. (2015). To be or not to be Charlie: Twitter hashtags as a discourse and counter-discourse in the aftermath of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting in France. CEUR workshop proceedings, 1395, 33-37

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Conference Name: Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Making Sense of Microposts at the 24th International World Wide Web Conference
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: May 19, 2015
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 17, 2019
• Electronic ISSN: 1613-0073
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 1395
• Pages: 33-37
• Publisher URL: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1395/paper_12.pdf
• Additional Information: Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Making Sense of Microposts co-located with the 24th International World Wide Web Conference.; Additional Information : Recipient of the best paper award (social sciences track) by GESIS.