Tweeting for peace? Twitter and the Ardoyne parade dispute in Belfast, July 2014

Abstract

This paper explores how social media can facilitate peace building by focusing on how citizens used Twitter during a contentious march in the Ardoyne district of North Belfast in July 2014. Fears of a repeat of sectarian clashes seen a year earlier were not realized, and the study was designed to empirically investigate whether critics and supporters of the Orange Order used the microblogging site to help reduce the sectarian tensions that surrounded the contentious parade. In particular, it focused on how users responded to rumors and disinformation spread on the microblogging site, which had the potential to incite violence in the contested interface area. The nature of the debate amongst those 'tweeters' who commented on the contentious Ardoyne parade was also investigated, with a focus on how they framed the attitudes and behavior of the 'other' community during these events. Results indicate that the majority of tweeters praised both sides for keeping the parade and related protests peaceful. However, Twitter did not appear to be a shared space capable of fostering crosscommunity consensus on how to resolve the parade dispute. The study suggests that Twitter's most significant contribution to peace building in Northern Ireland might lie in its empowerment of citizens to correct rumors and disinformation, which have the potential to exacerbate sectarian tensions and generate intercommunal violence. Contents

Organizational Hashtags During Times of Crisis: Analyzing the Broadcasting and Gatekeeping Dynamics of #PorteOuverte During the November 2015 Paris Terror Attacks

“…Although our focus was on its broadcasting and gatekeeping dynamics, it was still important to identify the most active tweeters in #PorteOuverte. Similar to previous research into crisis hashtags (Bruns et al, 2012;Lotan et al, 2011;Reilly, 2016), there was a long-tail distribution of user activity within #PorteOuverte. A total of 208,015 tweeters were identified in the corpus, the majority of whom (149,671 or 71.2%) only posted once during the night of the terror attacks.…”

“…Moreover, the "democratizing" potential of these hashtags should not be overstated. While citizens do have greater opportunities to co-curate information flows during hybrid media events, content posted by bloggers and professional journalists continues to be the most widely shared on Twitter (Chadwick, 2013;Lotan et al, 2011;Reilly, 2016).…”

“…Twitter hashtags, in particular, have empowered citizens to play "increasingly performative and constitutive roles" in these events through their sharing of eyewitness testimonies on the microblogging site (Tikka, 2019, p. 105). Nevertheless, doubts remain about the extent to which non-elite actors actually influence these information flows; research indicates that content posted by professional journalists on Twitter during acute crisis events is more widely shared than tweets posted by citizens (Lotan et al, 2011;Reilly, 2016). Although there has been a burgeoning research interest in crisis hashtags over the past decade (see Bruns et al, 2016, for example), there have been few studies exploring how broadcasting and gatekeeping dynamics evolve as these events unfold.…”

Measuring Violence: A Computational Analysis of Violence and Propagation of Image Tweets From Political Protest

“…Today, authorities have adapted to social media environments too and share their perspective from protest events (Neumayer et al, 2016). Yet, while authorities antagonize the protesters and the protests themselves by sharing visual content focused on violence initiated by activists (Neumayer & Rossi, 2018), citizens try to create a counter-narrative to the dominant portrayal of protest events or correct rumors and disinformation by mainstream media and police via the sharing of visual content witnessing violence as injustice by police (Hermida & Hernández-Santaolalla, 2018; Reilly, 2016).…”

War or peace tweets? The case of Pakistan

“…Dominant Twitter accounts often belong to traditional media and politicians, so one cannot assume that digital platforms represent a liberal independent media sphere (Golovchenko et al, 2018). Some preliminary work (though not focusing specifically on war and peace framing indicators), explored how social media can facilitate peace building by examining how citizens used Twitter during a contentious 2014 parade dispute in Belfast Findings showed that while the platform empowered citizens to correct rumors and disinformation, it appears to have failed in fostering cross-community consensus on how to resolve the dispute and promote peace (Reilly, 2016).…”