Discussing conflict in social media: The use of Twitter in the Jammu and Kashmir conflict

Abstract

Social media have come to play a vital role not only in our everyday lives, but also in times of conflict and crisis such as natural disasters or civil wars. Recent research has highlighted, on the one hand, the use of social media as a means of recruitment by terrorists and, on the other hand, the use of Facebook, Twitter, etc. to gain the support of the population during insurgencies. This article conducts a qualitative content analysis of content on Twitter concerning the conflict in the Jammu and Kashmir region. The tweets following the death of a popular militant, Burhan Wani, cover three different themes: (1) criticism of intellectuals; (2) Burhan Wani’s impact on the conflict; and (3) tweets referring to the conflict itself. Generally, people use Twitter to make their own point of view clear to others and discredit the opposing party; at the same time, tweets reflect the antagonism between the two parties to the conflict, India and Pakistan. The sample of tweets reflects the lack of awareness among people in the region regarding the motivations of the new generation of militancy emerging in Kashmir after 1990.

War or peace tweets? The case of Pakistan

“…Unlike the critical nature of framing studies of conflict in traditional news outlets, conflict studies focusing on social media have been mainly strategic in nature — analyzing how enemy groups use social media for war purposes and helping governments combat enemy strategy (i.e. Archetti, 2015; Fahmy, 2020; Gabel et al, 2020; Weimann, 2016). These studies specifically, focused on analyzing the social media campaign of the Islamic State group.…”

Social Media as Solidarity Vehicle During the 2020 #EndSARS Protests in Nigeria

“…The researcher also analysed tweets and replies from the hashtags ‘#EndSARS’ to evaluate the reactions of Nigerians on Twitter. In this context, social media platforms offer many opportunities to conduct research on a wide range of topics and the analysis of its content during protests movements can provide valuable insights regardless of researchers’ geographical location and thus enables scholars to access data in diverse locations where field research could prove improbable (Gabel et al, 2020). Also, Facebook and Twitter are found to be two of the promising sites for analysing global debates on key issues due to the open environment of the data (Hussain et al, 2021; Uwalaka et al, 2020).…”

“…The process of developing categories commenced by repeatedly reading the material to detect recurring words or themes – codes, from the data. Based on how these codes link, categories and sub-categories are developed to group the codes into clusters representing meaningful and distinct themes (Gabel et al, 2020). The tweets and replies were grouped into those (1) that show solidarity with the protesters in the streets, (2) that were exasperated with bad governance and police brutality, (3) that invalidated the protests, (4) that validated the protests and (5) those referring to any other issue – which was termed ‘others’.…”

Selfies and Speeches of a President at War: Volodymyr Zelensky’s Strategy of Spectacularization on Instagram

“…For all these reasons, the role of social media and ICTs in conflicts and crises is a subject that has roused the interest of the academic community, which has investigated contexts as varied as the war in Syria (Rohde et al, 2016), the Palestinian conflict (Wulf et al, 2013), the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir (Gabel et al, 2020), the war for Karabakh (Chernobrov, 2022), among others.…”