#Omofobia: : Equality advocacy and anti-equality in incursions - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

#Omofobia: : Equality advocacy and anti-equality in incursions

Tommaso Trillo University of Lodz GRACE Project 12th ECPR General Conference University of Hamburg 22-25 August 2018

Twitter as a space for political engagement

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows users to

• Create a semi-public profile for themselves and ‘follow’ other users
• post short messages known as ‘tweets’ (140 characters, expanded to

a 280)

• Broadcast their tweets to a community of ‘followers’
• Participate in aggregate conversation on specific topics via ‘hashtags’

The social media platform ‘Twitter’ is owned by the for-profit corporation Twitter Inc., that capitalizes on user’s time and unpaid labor on the platform through different forms of targeted advertising (Fuchs 2013).

Context

• The International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia

(IDAHOTB) falls every year on May 17th.

• The first ‘official’ observance of IDAHOTB (at the time, IDAHO) in 2005
• Transphobia was added to the official name in 2009
• Biphobia was also added in 2015
• IDAHOTB 2017 in Italy mostly featured discussions tied to
• First law on same-sex civil unions in 2016
• Law on homophobia stuck in parliament since 2014
• Mounting visibility for anti-equality arguments from the catholic- and far-right
• New coalition government headed by a populist right-leaning party and a far-right party

Theoretical roadmap

KhosraviNik (2017): Social media – Critical discourse studies (SM-CDS)

• Power in discourse and power of discourse operate alongside each other in the context of

social media communication

• Discourse analysists should account for ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ contextualization

Bruns and Burgess (2011): ad hoc publics

• Hashtags can serve the purpose of creating and addressing a community of interest

concentrated around a specific topic and gathered for the occasion

Papacharissi (2015): affective public

• Affect rather than affiliation holds together the “community” that forms around an #

Fuchs (2011; 2013; 2016): asymmetrical political attention economy of capitalism

• Social media do not constitute a public sphere because visibility is unequally distributed
• they are colonized by private interests (especially corporations)

Sample

• Data gathered from the Twitter hashtag

#omofobia (Italian for ‘homophobia’) through the Ncapture web-plugin of Nvivio 11

• One month timespan (May 8th – June 8th, 2017)
• Leading up to and following IDAHOTB 2017
• A corpus of 7,934 between tweets and retweets

4,927 of the tweets gathered were tweeted on the day of IDAHOTB (62% of the dataset) No other peak in activity during the one-month sample

Temporal distribution

Centralization/decentralization

Username category #RTs

@vladiluxuria politician 238 @Ri_Ghetto journalist 191 @Simo_Ventura TV host 158 @Radio_Zek Web radio 152 @LaFossettaDiH Blogger 138 @BiblioBastia Public library 137 @PhobiaHomo Blogger 129 @fe_desanctis Journalist 125 @MiurSocial Ministry of Education 115 @scialpifans Pop singer’s fan club 91

Traditional elites Public library Web-based influencers Anti-equality voices

Examples from the dataset

Pro-equality Love is beautiful, it is human beings that suck. #homophobia #loveislove

(@Ri_Ghetto, Journalist)

TODAY I encountered an Italy against #homophobia and #cyberbullism, but I hope the same for TOMORROW

(@LaFossettaDiH, blogger)

On the day against #homophobia, it is good to remember that the law has been stuck in Parliament for 3years and a half #17May

(@fe_desanctis, journalist)

Anti-equality #globaldayagainsthomophobia Arcigay: 196 cases of #homophobia in Italy, including conferences on #gender [link to FB page]

(@nelleNote, anti-equality blogger)

#Homophobia as an excuse to empty from within not only Chrstian culture, but also freedom of thought [link to facebook page]

(@sentinpiedi, anti-equality group)

Conclusions

• #omofobia was found to be a space where
• Traditional elites did have the lion share of visibility
• Non-traditional elites could find some visibility
• Private users mostly figured as ‘audience’
• Temporality and affectivity were found to be crucial elements in

the language adopted by the users involved

• Now-ness essential to tweeted communication
• Love, hope, fear, indignation as key in many of the tweets in the corpus
• Conversational aspects were hard to detect and probably

scarce, despite the fact that users in favor and against equality adopted the hashtag

• Pro-equality users hardly seemed to respond to each other
• Anti-equality users did not tweet in conversation with pro-equality

users but a the margins

Fuchs (e.g. 2013) Khosravinik (2017) Papacharissi (2015) Bruns and Burgess (2011)

Thank you!!!

Tommaso Trillo University of Lodz GRACE Project tommaso.trillo@uni.lodz.pl Twitter: @TommyTrillo