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Im/mediately Unified: Analyzing Online Reactions of the European Public to Jihadist Terror Attacks
Social Media has become a ‘real’ extension of the public discourse and acts as a platform on which to discuss and elaborate on these public debates further. Especially after traumatic events, such as terror attacks, social media stages become even more important, because they allow users to engage w...
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| Format: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Philipps-Universität Marburg
2024
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| Online Access: | PDF Full Text |
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| Summary: | Social Media has become a ‘real’ extension of the public discourse and acts as a platform on which to discuss and elaborate on these public debates further. Especially after traumatic events, such as terror attacks, social media stages become even more important, because they allow users to engage with but also create the content that is being shared and reproduced. The problem that this can cause, however, is that content that is shared on cyberspace often leads to an onslaught of meaning making or sensemaking processes, where people are looking to media do find answers to the predicament that they are facing. Questions as to what has happened, the reasoning behind it and who the enemy are of utmost importance in order to decide what the next step is. However, this information vacuum can be filled by many different outlets. While turning to news on mainstream media, such as television and radio was the norm in the past millennium, the age of the internet and especially the wide spread use of hand held devices has made social media a more appealing and popular candidate as news and information source. Nevertheless, the shift from mainly mainstream to social media use has not only changed how one consumes, but also what one consumes. While mainstream media was highly controlled and was the result of strictly gatekept information by journalistic authorities, the explosion of the sheer amount of cybermedia outlets, including social media, has and continues to provide different types of information to the publics that is scarcely filtered or regulated by authorities.
Especially, terror attacks play an important role in which social media functions. An increase in national emotion, which can be summarized as Eriksson’s cultural trauma (Eriksson, 2016), and the need to fill an information vacuum leads people to engage in conversations online and to share, reshare or comment on content that is available, all the while creating more content. Here, the individuals are not only users of the information that is being shared, as is the case with mainstream media, but are also podusing content (by sharing, resharing, etc.), which makes them neither solely users nor producers, but a hybrid ‘produser’ (Bruns, 2007). This characteristic of individuals using social media and the personalized nature of the social media environment, offering the produsers a wide array of interest groups, puts the individual front and center of their own network. Here, people can identify themselves by their own lifestyle, create their own opinion spaces and shape their political world based on their own emotional politics. This, however, has the potential to become feeding ground to right-wing populist sentiments, in which people start to define themselves only with others that are ‘like them’.
The ‘out of the ordinary’ status that terror attacks evoke call for not only the need to pay tribute to the fallen but also the need to define the enemy. This in turn leads to the creation of symbols and rituals that play a role in both the offline as in the online world. With the help of hashtags these rituals and symbols thus are aggregated, saved, and made findable for the public at large. However, these hashtag conversations also make it possible for like-minded people to come together and also for those that represent differing opinion to be shunned, in which a ‘you are either with us or with the enemy’ sentiment can be adopted.
While the Islamist terror attacks are the result of extremism, the attacks are no doubt linked to the religion of Islam and Muslims at large, which ultimately leads to the creation of in-groups that is defined by the creation of the understanding as to what “the other” constitutes. In the words of van Zuijdewijn “while terrorism is frequently compared to theater, terrorism attacks are only the opening acts [and] set the stage for the main act” (de Roy van Zuijdewijn, 2021). So, while no doubt terrorism attacks are a gruesome act and should be shunned by all, it is important that the heightened emotional state in which the public finds itself does not translate into an increase of xenophobia and ostracization online. Further, public online reactions should not be shifting the Overton window in such a way that people start supporting laws and regulations that, prior to the attack, would have been considered unacceptable.
This thesis stresses that studying reactions to terror attacks and thus also Islam are crucial in understanding how the Overton window surrounding Islam is changed and shifted, while reinforcing and reaffirming only previous beliefs or notions.
Ultimately, it is unlikely that social media is a place where beliefs are changed and it also unlikely that reactions shared online after, or concerning, the Charlie Hebdo attacks were not shared with the intention of changing one’s mind, but rather sharing own opinions and particularly in ways that would not have been permitted or tolerated in face-to-face interactions or in the ‘real’ world. This in turn, influences the Overton window of political possibility concerning Islam because hateful anti-Muslim reactions become naturalized. This mainly happens because these types of reactions are shared within personal echo chambers and receive feedback only from a like-minded social group. The only time that these ideas might be exposed to extra local social circles is when the mechanism of trench warfare actually serves to reinforce the belief or opinion although it receives negative feedback.
Within this thesis it has been shown that the power that social media needs to be recognized further because the advent and wide spread use of social media has caused a shift in media consumption and has definitely shifted away from traditional journalistic gatekeeping authorities to a more open yet individualistic media consumption online. This can have problematic effects since authority, even if it is not something that is apparent, is highly important for sensemaking processes after traumatic events. While mass media worked by providing a manufactured frame by which to understand events such as terror attacks but also an almost mechanical way in which to deal with an imagined ‘national wound’. In the process, creating in and out groups of who belonged to the nation and who did not. The shift of power from mass to social media thus had the effect the effect that it shifted the timeline of how and when people were going to be ‘healed’ from the national wound that the terror attack has apparently caused. This result could be seen because social media for the first time created a platform through which the discussion could be continued through the use of hashtags, groups, and pages on which not only the media event, but also the media frame could be discussed further. Thus, this thesis shows that anti-Muslim hate plays an important role in acting as an audience unifier (RQ1) on social media and thus leads to online community building, even if these communities do not constitute the main public discourse.
Likewise, it has been found that opinion leaders play an important role post-Charlie Hebdo attack and can be defined in many different ways. One of the most important features, if not the most important, is retweetability and constitutes the probability of having a tweet shared, or retweeted. It is found that the virtual opinion leaders build up their credibility through a relatively high follower count and thus are presumed to display a level of trustworthiness, which leads people to retweet them. Further, it is important to mention that private opinion leaders were more popular than those that had some affiliation with mass or traditional media, thus underlining the fact that the opinion leaders that were retweeted most became as such due to the effects of social media to begin with and played an important role as leading voices also within the post-Charlie Hebdo attack discussion, no matter if they had received an official authentication from Twitter through the blue tick (RQ2).
Next, it has been established with this thesis that Charlie Hebdo itself became a crucial symbol or even totem around which people converged. It was illustrated here, however, that the grand total of tweet reactions directly after the attacks on Twitter can be divided into two main categories, on one side the ‘solidarity’ group which not only include reactions that were simply standing in solidarity with the victims but also those that were equating what had happened during the attacks with the permissibility of anti-Muslim hate. On the other hand, however, categorized responses that were calling for more respect for Muslims and were against anti-Muslim targeting, those that were trying to clarify the difference between Islamist terrorism and the Muslim belief, but also the ones that were trying to justify the attacks. Nevertheless, these two main categories also reflected the most important two opinions within the data which also are cause for collective effervescence, albeit being of two different ends of the opinion spectrum (RQ3).
Also, this thesis has found that laicite, as an umbrella term, is able to cause the image of group unity for those that subscribe to it in the online discussion surrounding the Charlie Hebdo attacks (RQ4), this, in turn, leads to many facets of mobility and mobilization. This study identifies three main discourses which all reaffirm the underlying image of Charlie Hebdo as a prime representative for French secularism and the idea that supporting the magazine is key for standing for French values and that this stands in opposition to Islamic values.
Having identified this pattern is of utmost importance, because, it is also found in this thesis that echo chambers and trench warfare play an important role in the affirmation and reaffirmation of the different images of Islam that are built on previous and inherent convictions and opinions (RQ5).
Finally, it is also important to explore the long-term effects that anti-Muslim hate can cause after jihadi terrorist attacks. Therefore, this thesis ends with the exploration of how average Muslims are creating voices for themselves in which to make themselves heard and to address or even defend themselves against anti-Muslim hate. It thus follows that comic relief plays a pivotal role in creating a tool or a means in which Muslims can speak up against the anti-Muslim hate all the while making sure that their work stays easily digestible and acceptable to the greater public.
As a final word, it is crucial to mention that the findings of this research are merely a snapshot into the volatile environment of social media that is partially at the whim of those that own the multi-million dollar businesses that, as a normal netizen, one only experiences as social media platform. One such business transaction has changed not only the way in which social media is consumed, but has also research will and can be conducted. Here, obviously a reference is made to the acquisition of Twitter and its subsequent change into X. It was however not only a name change that Twitter experienced. The changes that Musk has enforced since his acquisition include many unpopular changes such as; getting rid of the blue verification tick while replacing it with a paid alternative, charging money for all data downloading services and hiking up the price for already paid services for academics, and limiting the posts that users can freely see (Valero, 2023). This profound change has left a feeling of uncertainty in its wake, with many academics not necessarily deleting their accounts, but shifting their focus to other alternatives such as Mostodon, Bluesky, Threads and TikTok, however, none have crystalized as a social media platform that is as universal as the former Twitter (ibid, 2023).
The reason for focusing on former Twitter here is because this, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic were two major changes that influenced the social media environment and cyberspace in general during the period this thesis was researched and written. Here, the idea is not to necessarily critique the changes that happened, but to highlight the volatile nature of the social media environment. Terror attacks, social media platform changes, and global health crises are all factors that can change a perceived social media environment that one is used to and depends on to some extent. This thesis, thus, aimed to underline the importance of not only studying and trying to understand the social media environment during its ‘sedentary’ times, but to especially be able to understand the patterns that are bound to reveal themselves during times of motion in order to also comprehend the real time effects these changes can have. |
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| DOI: | 10.17192/z2024.0211 |