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Download fileDigital traces of ‘Twitter revolutions’: Resistance, polarization and surveillance via contested images and texts of Occupy Gezi
journal contribution
posted on 2020-05-05, 10:36 authored by Ozge Ozduzen, Aidan McGarryAidan McGarryProtest movements have been galvanized recently by social media and are commonly,
and somewhat hyperbolically, referred to by mainstream media as “Twitter revolutions.”
This article identifies social media as a battleground for disseminating contending versions
of reality, not only during Twitter revolutions, but also in their aftermath. Articulating the
enduring impact of popular social movements and examining how protestors and
governmental supporters contest their meaning over time, the article studies the digital
traces of the Gezi Park protests in Turkey (2013) after the mobilization dissipated. The
digital traces of protests act as critical digital artifacts of contestation with actors on both
sides (pro- and anti-AKP [Justice and Development Party] government in Turkey). These
digital traces are reanimated by both actors to build support, assert truth claims, foster
identity/community, and/or demand recognition. The article deploys content and
multimodal analyses of texts and images on Twitter, shared through hashtags on the
protests when the protests’ alleged leaders faced trials (2018‒2019).
History
School
- Loughborough University London
Published in
International Journal of CommunicationVolume
14Pages
2543 - 2563Publisher
University of Southern California. Annenburg PressVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The authorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Annenburg Press under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Acceptance date
2020-03-01Publication date
2020-04-27ISSN
1932-8036Publisher version
Language
- en