Following a shooting attack by two self-proclaimed Islamist gunmen at the offices of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015, there emerged the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie on Twitter as an expression of solidarity and support for the magazine’s right to free speech. Almost simultaneously, however, there was also #JeNeSuisPasCharlie explicitly countering the former, affirmative hashtag. Based on a multimethod analysis of 74,047 tweets containing #JeNeSuisPasCharlie posted between 7 and 11 January, this article reveals that users of the hashtag under study employed various discursive strategies and tactics to challenge the mainstream framing of the shooting as the universal value of freedom of expression being threatened by religious extremism, while protecting themselves from the risk of being viewed as disrespecting victims or endorsing the violence committed. The significance of this study is twofold. First, it extends the literature on strategic speech acts by examining how such acts take place in a social media context. Second, it highlights the need for a multidimensional and reflective methodology when dealing with data mined from social media
Drawing on van Meter’s (2000) article examining the methodological literature relating to research on “sensitive” topics, we analyse the corresponding journal literature in the decade following. We present data on authorship patterns, identify thematic continuities and discontinuities, and draw attention to gaps in the existing literature.
This article examines the web ecology of the 2010 local elections in South Korea by using social science hyperlink analysis. The online networks of candidates were measured daily during the official campaign period. The results indicate that network dynamics among the candidates for education superintendent changed more rapidly as the campaign progressed than in the case of the mayoral candidates. However, the intensity of online networks for both campaigns was lower than for the country’s last presidential election, in 2007, suggesting that the web ecology of a given election is influenced by the perceived importance of the event and the general popularity of certain candidates. The results also suggest that producing and disseminating information, such as news articles, blog posts and tweets, reflects a more politically conscious action than referring to information via hyperlinks. Furthermore, the article sheds light on the ways in which hyperlink analysis serves as a research method for mining data for web ecology analysis, tracking political events at different points in time and illustrating the general landscape of electoral communication in cyberspace.
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