Hashtag Dissent: Finding Meaning in the Counter-Narrative of the #Idlenomore Protests in Canada

• In Event: Methodological Advances in Digital Content Analysis: Inductive and Deductive Approaches to ‘Big Data’ Research in Journalism Studies

Abstract

Studies into movements such as #Egypt and #Occupy indicate how committed individuals are appropriating social media as one of the tools to articulate a counter narrative and contest dismissive framing by mainstream media. The focus of our project was the Idle No More movement in Canada. What started as an Aboriginal protest in December 2012 developed into a loosely knit political movement with Twitter serving as an alternative platform of public communication. With Idle No More, a collaborative recovery of historical narratives of Canada’s colonial past and legacy was negotiated through an integrated suite of new media tools and social movement organization, articulated through the #Idlenomore hashtag.
Our study examines how a hashtag facilitated the visibility of a marginalized social reality and how mainstream media narratives were simultaneously reproduced and disputed by the actions of engaged individuals. Using the #Idlenomore hashtag as a framework for analysis, we were able to discern the narratives emerging from a movement that did not have specific, concise demands that can be easily explained by the media, but instead presented open-ended, unspecified meta-narratives where participants created their own meaning.
The presentation will address the challenges of extracting meaning from the 767,666 tweets using the hashtag collected over the two months during which the movement rose to prominence in Canada. Our goal was to identify the key subset of actors and media content framing the discourse on Twitter. We will delve into the benefits and limitations of using a commercial social media analytics tool with proprietary algorithms for data collection and analysis.

Authors

• Alfred Hermida, University of British Columbia

• Candis Callison, University of British Columbia