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, May). 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. Presented at Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Making Sense of Microposts at the 24th International World Wide Web Conference, Florence Italy

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Making Sense of Microposts at the 24th International World Wide Web Conference
• Start Date: May 18, 2015
• End Date: May 22, 2015
• 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
• Series ISSN: 1613-0073
• 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.