Framing Indigenous protest in the online public sphere: A comparative frame analysis

Abstract

Indigenous social movement organizations are increasingly using social media to engage in strategic framing, a dynamic discursive process that seeks to attribute meaning to events and circumstances. But there remains a gap in our knowledge with respect to the impact of social media on the capacity of Indigenous actors to engage in frame competition in the virtual world. Based on a comparative frame analysis of online content in three Latin American countries where Indigenous organizations have recently engaged in large-scale protest, we ask to what extent the frames generated by Indigenous actors on social media are reflected in the online public sphere. We examine how their protest action is framed by Indigenous organizations themselves, the media, and government agencies. We find that social media do provide an outlet for Indigenous actors to disseminate counter-hegemonic frames. But state and media actors do not engage with Indigenous frames disseminated over social media, and their messages do not change the tone or direction of online discourse.