Protest Twittering. How Twitter Networks Contributed to the Escalation of the G20 Protests in Hamburg 2017

Abstract

The article asks to what extent the social medium Twitter has contributed to the violent escalation of the G20 protests in Hamburg in 2017. The thesis is that parallel to the escalation of the protests in the streets of Hamburg, an antagonistic discourse dynamic is taking place in Twitter, which favours a self-reinforcing spiral of solidarity and enemy image construction. The present analysis thus underpins the assumption, now commonplace in both protest and movement research and in the sociology of violence, that escalating conflict processes are necessarily accompanied by transformations of cognitive patterns of perception and interpretation, which, due to their polarizing effect, become a central component of the causal structure of violent conflicts.