The Organization of a Movement on Telegram: The Yellow Vests in France

• In Event: Parties and the Politics of Protest

Abstract

The discursive modalities of social media theorized as "Social Media Communication" (SMC) (KhosraiNik 2017, 2019) specifically impact the contents, style and characteristics of discourses but also the usual forms and functioning of citizen mobilizations (interactions, structuring of collectives) (Chadwick, 2014) (Tufecki, 2019). For this communication we plan to work on structuring the French yellow vest movement. December 2018, the Gilets Jaunes are preparing to demonstrate by being now structured outside the so-called traditional socio-digital networks. If this movement, which claims horizontality, the absence of a representative and therefore of a spokesperson, was formed as early as November 2018 both on the traffic circles of French cities and deployed on a myriad of Facebook pages, it is on an underground messaging system and renowned for its anonymity and the security of its data that it will continue its deployment. The visibility and the "showcase" dimension of the movement (Sebbah, 2019) represented by the Facebook pages and groups, no longer seems to be a determining factor in the deployment of the movement. In line with the theoretical current of "connective actions" (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012), they would make it possible to reach people who do not belong to organizations (unions, political parties, NGOs, etc.) and would bring people who are not usually involved in collective actions to take part in the movement. We wondered, following our work on the visible and official pages of the Yellow Vests (Twitter, Facebook) (Souillard, 2019) as well as the work of other researchers (Cointet, Cardon, 2021 ), what the reason for this partial migration of the movement might be and whether the dynamics of the movement were different on these more confidential spaces.

After analyzing the language positions of the "yellow vests" on social networks (FB, Twitter) (Souillard and al., 2019)t and in the national and regional press, we propose here to work on the Telegram messaging application. Contributors are here in a secure space: they can post their messages on one of the thematic discussion threads and organize themselves in real time according to the demonstrations and mobilizations. Telegram thus offers an advantage for the protest movement, which can then structure itself online in complete confidentiality. The problematic that occupies us here aims at questioning the modalities linked to the device and to the discursive content of investment of the cause by the online actors. Can the status and the functionalities of the socio-technical device shed light on the mobilization process and its dynamics? After a general presentation of the functioning of the application we propose a more detailed analysis to try to answer the following questions: How does the Telegram application structure the movement? Is there an evolution in the discourse of contributors throughout the mobilization? Can we identify functions to these threads and in general to the device? Is there an identifiable purpose of this thread (organization and coordination of the struggle, real-time mobilization coverage, real-time field coordination, cause discussions or conversation space) From a methodological point of view, we will focus mainly on one of the threads of discussions (“bla bla”) directly dedicated to the organization of the movement from November 2018 (date of creation of the thread) to March (exhaustion of mobilization and discussions). After collecting the data related to the discussion thread, we will use the Iramuteq lexicometry software, which through a Reinert analysis, will allow us to identify the different speech classes over the chosen period in order to show the changes and lexical invariants to this French mobilization.


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Authors

• brigitte sebbah, Université Toulouse III Paul Sabatier

• Pierre Ratinaud, Université de Toulouse Jean Jaurès