A Hashtag Worth a Thousand Words: Discursive Strategies Around JeNeSuisPasCharlie After the 2015 Charlie Hebdo Shooting

Summary

This paper investigates how Twitter users mobilised the counter-hashtag JeNeSuisPasCharlie (“I am not Charlie”) in the wake of the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris. Against the overwhelming tide of JeSuisCharlie solidarity, the authors treat the dissenting hashtag as a window into how social media users carve out space for disagreement during moments of mass affective convergence. The paper argues that JeNeSuisPasCharlie operated less as an endorsement of the violence than as a discursive vehicle for nuance, critique, and refusal of a totalising solidarity frame.

Key Contributions

• Offers an empirical case study of counter-hashtag practice, extending hashtag research beyond canonical solidarity or activist hashtags.
• Articulates how dissent is rhetorically managed online during high-salience, emotionally charged events.
• Contributes to debates on free speech, identity, and the politics of solidarity in the post-Charlie Hebdo public sphere.

Methods

Qualitative/discursive analysis of Twitter posts carrying the JeNeSuisPasCharlie hashtag in the period following the January 2015 attack, with attention to the rhetorical strategies users adopted to articulate disagreement.

Findings

• JeNeSuisPasCharlie served as a recognisable site of dissent and nuance positioned against the dominant JeSuisCharlie narrative.
• Users deployed distinct discursive strategies to register disagreement while distancing themselves from endorsement of the violence.
• (More granular findings are not specified in the available summary.)

Connections

No related papers have been provided under shared topics, so no intellectual wikilinks can be drawn here. Thematically, the work sits adjacent to literatures on hashtag activism, networked publics, and the discursive negotiation of solidarity after terrorist events.