To Be or Not to Be Charlie: Twitter Hashtags as a Discourse and Counter-discourse in the Aftermath of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo Shooting in France

Following a shooting attack by two self-proclaimed Islamist gunmen at the offices of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on 7th January 2015, there emerged the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie on Twitter as an expression of condolences for the victims, solidarity, and support for the magazine’s right to free speech. A lmos t s imu l t aneous ly, howeve r, t he r e was a l so #JeNeSuisPasCharlie explicitly countering the former, affirmative hashtag. In this paper, we analyse 74,047 tweets containing #JeNeSuisPasCharlie posted between 7th and 11th January. Our network analysis and semantic cluster analysis of those 74,047 tweets reveal that the hashtag in question constituted a form of resistance to the mainstream framing of the issue as freedom of expression being threatened by religious intolerance and violence. The resistance was manifested through three phases: sharing condolences but indicating a reservation against the mainstream frame (Grief); voicing out resistance against the frame (Resistance); and developing and deploying alternative frames such as hate speech, Eurocentrism, and Islamophobia (Alternatives). The hashtag in this context served as a vehicle through which users formed, enhanced, and declared their self-identity.