Picture a Protest: Analyzing Media Images Tweeted From Ferguson

Abstract

This content analysis examines media depiction of events in Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown by a police officer. Using images from the Twitter feeds of nine major media outlets in the month following the shooting, it identifies themes present in those images. Descriptive statistics reveal differences in the roles of people who appear to be White and those who appear to be Black. The two groups are rarely pictured together. The visual narrative presented on Twitter depicts two distinct sides. Police are consistently shown prepared for conflict, but rarely are protesters in images with police. The implications of these findings are explored through the theoretical viewpoint of agenda setting.

Social Media, Networked Protest, and the March for Science

“…Researchers could also conduct in-depth interviews and participant observation to develop more nuanced understandings of how and why participants in networked protests use a range of social media and other communication channels before, during, and after networked protest events (see, for example, Costanza-Chock, 2014; Gawerc, 2015;Murthy, 2018;Rohlinger & Bunnage, 2015. Relatedly, researchers could conduct textual and content analyses of social media pages, groups, and hashtags to analyze the ways in which individuals participate in different social media sites as part of their online and offline engagement for different purposes and at different points in time (see, for example, Alaimo, 2015;Carney, 2016;Cowart et al, 2016). Finally, researchers could use the results here as starting points for exploring similarities and differences in social media uses and effects across multiple networked protests (e.g., Tufekci, 2017).…”

Seeing the smart city on Twitter: Colour and the affective territories of becoming smart

“…They use a "blended" approach (Lewis et al, 2013: 36), which assumes that large numbers of tweeted images can be analysed, sometimes automatically, to produce patterns of varying degrees of interest, but that the (more important) meaning of tweeted images must be identified by human observers looking at much smaller numbers (see Hochman and Manovich, 2013;Manovich and Douglass, 2011;Vis et al, 2013). In fact, most studies of tweeted images conduct a manual content analysis on a few hundred tweeted images at most (see for example Cowart et al, 2016;Kharroub and Bas, 2015;Seo, 2014;Thelwall et al, 2016;Vis et al, 2013). This method rests on long traditions of close hermeneutic reading in both the humanities and the social sciences (Brooker et al, 2016).…”

Representing environmental harm and resistance on Twitter: The case of the TAP pipeline in Italy

“…The relevance of social media to the study of recent political protest (including the 2011 movements in Egypt, Spain and the United States) has also been recognized in other social science disciplines, including sociology (see e.g. Gerbaudo, 2012; Tufekci and Wilson, 2012), and has led to interdisciplinary projects also involving science, communication and technology studies (Cowart et al, 2016;Mercea, 2011), and international relations (e.g. Howard et al, 2011).…”

“…Media and particularly the social media, however, can also be used by people, for example by the affected populations, to channel alternative representations of green stories and environmental harms, which may be in opposition to dominant media frames. Despite their potential to uncover under-reported green harms and crimes, raise awareness and stimulate social and/or legal response, 3 counter-representations of environmental crimes and harms in social media have so far largely been understudied in green cultural criminology as well as in green victimology (Hall, 2017;Williams, 1996).…”

“…In this case, tough repressive action and violence committed by governmental agencies against the Sioux Tribe and activists (mostly perpetrated between September and December 2016) received extensive exposure via social media (especially, via YouTube and Twitter, mostly through the use of the hashtag #NoDAPL). The relevance of social media to the study of recent political protest (including the 2011 movements in Egypt, Spain and the United States), has also been recognised in other social science disciplines, including sociology (see, e.g., Gerbaudo, 2012;Tufekci and Wilson, 2012), and has led to interdisciplinary projects also involving science, communication and technology studies (Cowart et al, 2016;Mercea, 2011), and international relations (e.g., Howard et al, 2011).…”