Discussion and mediation of social outrage on Twitter: The reaction to the judicial sentence of "La Manada"

Abstract

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In recent years, digital feminism has been prominent in the international public sphere and the massive release of individual testimonies of violence against women has had an important presence on social media. In Spain, the reaction to the judicial sentence of the La Manada case, which only convicted the five men accused of abuse, rather than rape, provoked a public outrage that was negotiated on social networks and was later displayed in mass demonstrations across the country. The aim of this study is to analyze the reaction that took place on Twitter on the day of the ruling of the sentence (26 April 2018) and how the dominant frames were initiated and stabilized on Twitter. With a sample of almost 500.000 tweets, the posts achieving most retweets per hour and the most salient media objects (including hashtags, visual content and links) have been analyzed based on the framing theory. Media objects have been explored through flowcharts allowing the visualization of the evolution of the dominant messages. The results show a hegemonic conversation on Twitter against the ruling of the court with a high presence of feminist demands. Furthermore, the analysis of the evolution of the main frames shows that the different Twitter affordances allow rapidity in the negotiation of the dominant messages. This paper contributes to the understanding of the articulation of framing from a complex perspective including media objects such as images and URLs that broaden the layers of meaning of the Twitter discourse on collective actions.

Keywords

feminism, Twitter, framing, cyberfeminism, activism, social networks