Abstract
This chapter examines how, in a time of social and political upheaval, Twitter allows for the creation of a collective identity. Using Narrative Thematic Analysis to analyze responses to the 2018 People’s Vote March, this chapter seeks to understand how Twitter users collaborated to create meanings about the march, the Brexit referendum, and the future of the UK. Results show that Twitter’s affordances for cognitive and affective networking are widely used to create a sense of community and shared identity. However, these same affordances also create a space for an attack on this collective identity through abusive discourses. This reveals that the openness and connectivity that allows people to unite also opens them up to critique intended to destabilize their shared understandings.
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Notes
- 1.
Here it is important to note that this is not a complete archive of all the tweets tweeted under the hashtag but a sample anywhere from 1% of the tweets to over 40% of the complete hashtag dataset. By using the Twitter API option, which is the only free option available from Twitter, the dataset provided was limited, but still significant.
- 2.
The dataset is fully available on request from the author.
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Vrikki, P. (2020). #PeoplesVoteMarch or #LosersVoteMarch? Tracing the Collective Identity of a Post-Brexit Referendum Movement on Twitter. In: Bouvier, G., Rosenbaum, J.E. (eds) Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41421-4_4
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