Political hashtag publics and counter-visuality: a case study of #fertilityday in Italy

ABSTRACT

In 2016 the Italian health ministry launched the ‘Fertility Day’ campaign, aimed at tackling Italy’s low birth rate. Under the accusation of delivering sexist and racist messages, the campaign became a trending topic on Twitter, and a protest was launched to be held during Fertility Day. By applying a combination of digital methods and visual content analysis to the #fertilityday Twitter stream, this paper contributes to existing research on the deliberative strength of political hashtag publics, with a particular focus on their power structures, communication patterns and visual content use. Findings on gatekeeping dynamics downsize optimistic views on the democratising potential of Twitter’s socio-technical infrastructure as they point to the emergence of online satirical media and ‘tweetstars’ – along with mainstream news media– as main producers of spreadable content, with ordinary users only surfacing when traditional media elites and new satirical actors lack or lose interest in the debate. Results confirm that political hashtag publics follow acute event communication patterns, with users highly engaged in retweeting and referencing external material and visual content playing a key role in these gatewatching practices. The transient counter-visuality – or critical stance – of tweets with user-manipulated images, however, also suggests that the deliberative potential of these publics is not easily sustainable over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Gatekeeping
• hashtag publics
• public sphere
• Twitter
• visual data

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Stefania Vicari is is a senior lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research interests include the general areas of digital activism, framing, and social networks. Her works have appeared in a number of journals including Media, Culture and Society; New Media and Society; Poetics; Social Media + Society; Social Movement Studies; and Current Sociology.

Laura Iannelli (Ph.D in Social Theory and Research) is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Department of Economics and Business of Sassari University (Italy).

Elisabetta Zurovac (Ph.D in Sociology of Communication) is Research Fellow in Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Department of Economics and Business of Sassari University (Italy).

Notes

1 The via marker appears in tweets automatically generated when clicking on a web page’s share button. This feature enables the introduction of an online source and its contents in the Twittersphere. For a detailed discussion of RT, mention, and via conventions, see Meraz and Papacharissi (2013, p. 140)

2 In this study ‘satirical tweetstars’ are Twitter users who meet the following criteria: (1) they have more than 70,000 followers; (2) they are active daily and (3) they use their Twitter account primarily to produce satirical content around news stories.

3 In line with Tay (2014, p. 49), we only focused on still images because their creation requires little technical skills and they are consumable in short periods of time, with both features encouraging wider use and dissemination.

4 The article reports original Twitter handles of organisations, public figures, journalists and news editors. For privacy reasons, Twitter handles of ordinary users were replaced with pseudonyms.

5 By way of comparison, in Giglietto and Lee’s analysis, tweets with images only account for 10% of the dataset (2017, p. 7).