Twitter activism in the face of nationalist mobilisation: the case of the 2016 Catalan Diada

Abstract

This article examines the use of Twitter during the 2016 Catalan Diada (Catalan National Day). We aim at analysing the characteristics of the users that employed certain hashtags. To what extent there are significant differences across users employing different hashtags? Drawing on theories of national identity and polarisation, we look at the content of the tweets sent during the Diada. Taking advantage of a massive mobilisation event, we examine how Twitter users clustered around different hashtags, the content they transmitted or in which language they tweeted. The empirical analysis is based on a Twitter corpus of about 60,000 unique users and more than 200,000 tweets, which allows us to analyse their characterristics, the content they sent, and the language in which they did it. Our findings show that users clustered around different hashtags and that language is strongly correlated with the content of the tweet. In addition, content analysis of the messages sent within each of the clusters shows distinguishable political views on the independence debate.

Keywords

• twitter
• catalonia
• nationalism
• mobilization
• activism
• hashtag