Giglietto, F., & Lee, Y. (2017). A Hashtag Worth a Thousand Words: Discursive Strategies Around JeNeSuisPasCharlie After the 2015 Charlie Hebdo Shooting. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116686992
Summary
This paper investigates how Twitter users mobilised the hashtag JeNeSuisPasCharlie (“I am not Charlie”) in the wake of the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris. Positioning the tag as a counter-hashtag to the massively circulated JeSuisCharlie, the authors treat it as a strategic site where dissenting voices negotiated their position against a dominant expression of mass solidarity. The paper argues that participants developed distinct discursive strategies to articulate nuance, critique, and disagreement — often without condoning the violence — thereby complicating the apparently unified public response to the attack.
Key Contributions
- Offers a focused case study of counter-hashtag practices during a high-salience, emotionally charged news event.
- Extends work on hashtag activism by examining dissent within, rather than opposition to, moments of ostensible collective solidarity.
- Illuminates how users manage the rhetorical difficulty of dissenting from a solidarity frame without appearing to legitimise terrorist violence.
Methods
The study analyses Twitter posts carrying JeNeSuisPasCharlie following the January 2015 attack, using qualitative discursive analysis to identify the rhetorical strategies participants deployed to articulate their positions.
Findings
- JeNeSuisPasCharlie operated as a discursive space for dissent and nuance rather than as an endorsement of the attackers.
- Users deployed identifiable rhetorical strategies to distance themselves from the dominant solidarity frame while pre-empting accusations of sympathising with violence.
- Solidarity hashtags and their counter-hashtags coexist in tension, with the latter revealing pluralism obscured by aggregate metrics of participation in the former.
Connections
No other papers were provided under this topic, so no wikilinks are made here. Thematically, the work sits alongside broader literatures on hashtag activism, networked publics, and post-terror online discourse.