Feminicidio and #NiUna Menos: An Analysis of Twitter Conversations During the First 3 Years of the Argentinean Movement

Abstract

This article analyzes the Twitter conversations carrying the hashtag #NiUnaMenos produced in Argentina during the time of the marches in 2015, 2016, and 2017, by adopting a quali-quantitative method. After describing the origins of NiUnaMenos, we illustrate the mobilizing force of femicide in a context of technopolitical use of social media by women’s movements. Data analysis diachronically shows to what extent and in what terms conversations on NiUnaMenos refer to gender violence and femicide. The conclusions highlight the effective combination of femicide narrative, the Argentinean human rights tradition, and Twitter usages in transforming violence against women into a general civic matter.

Keywords

femicide violence against women social media

Introduction

Argentina, May 11, 2015: Chiara Páez, a 14-year-old girl, had been missing for 4 days before her body was found buried in her boyfriend’s backyard. The postmortem revealed that she was pregnant and had been brutally beaten to death. This was the latest case in a long string of heinous femicides: in fact, according to the Observatory “Adriana Marisel Zambrano,” in Argentina one woman died every 30 hr at that time.

In reaction to yet another brutal case of woman killing, Marcela Ojeda, a well-known journalist, issued a call to action through a tweet reading, “Women actors, politicians, artists, entrepreneurs, social activists . . . all women, are we not going to raise our voice? They are killing us.” With just a few sharp, intense words, Ojeda appealed to us, namely, a wide and vigorous community of women, to overcome divisions of education, income, and political belief, and unite in anger in the face of macho brutality. Ojeda’s tweet generated an immediate response in her followers, mainly women activists and journalists, who spread the appeal through the famous hashtag #NiUnaMenos. This recalled the words of Susana Chávez, a famous Mexican poet and activist who in 1995 inaugurated a protest against the systematic murders of women in Ciudad Juarez. The hashtag rapidly went viral, first on social media, and then on news outlets, TV, and radio, to the extent that it inspired the call for a mass march on June 3, 2015. The streets were packed with hundreds of thousands of people, mainly women, who appropriated the slogan, thus drawing public attention both to the specific problem of femicide and the wider issue of violence against women (VAW). Subsequently, mobilizations extended to Mexico, Uruguay, and Chile in the first year, and were repeated in the following years in Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Spain.

This mass engagement achieved by NiUnaMenos (NUM) as a movement can be understood in a larger context. Argentina is among the most economically developed countries in the region, with the second highest GDP per capita after Chile and with 90% of the population living in urban areas (Batista et al., 2017). In the UN Gender Inequality Index (GII), Argentina performed well, with a 0.358 score, ranking 47 out of 189 countries worldwide. In spite of these positive indicators, women in Argentina still face important challenges, such as male/female wage disparity, female poverty, and a high level of VAW. With specific regard to femicide, the Observatory “Adriana Marisel Zambrano” recorded a total of 2,094 cases between 2008 and 2015. In 2016, Argentina had one of highest rates of femicides in Latin America, with an incidence of 1.25 per 100,000 women (Rosales Matienzo, 2018). Moreover, in Argentina, women’s movements have a long tradition of activism, such as the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo human rights and women’s organization, were actively engaged in the democratic transition during the 1980s, and against austerity policies in the 1990s (Chenou & Cepeda, 2019). As of at least 2014, feminist activists have raised awareness on rates of femicide in the country through vociferous street protests. Murder for gender-related reasons was introduced into the country’s penal code in 2012, along with 15 other Latin American countries (Comisión Económica para América Latina, 2015). Despite the fact that since 1992 in Argentina, a national council of women has been working on related issues and data collection, and that, since 2009, a federal law has provided for the integral protection of women, no evident changes had occurred in the rates of femicide and VAW. The development and flow of ideas disseminated by NUM must be read against these contradictory features of Argentinean society: On one hand, relative well-being has enabled awareness among Argentinean women who, on the other hand, witness persisting challenges that might lead to mobilization. In this dissonance, the strategic use of social media has played a pivotal role in propagating collective indignation. Internet penetration in Argentina in 2015 was much higher than the Southern American average (75 vs. 48%), and 60% of population were active social media users (We Are Social, 2015), which can explain why people turned to digital platforms in significant numbers to support mobilization, especially women, given that there are more female than male social media users in the Americas (Batista et al., 2017).

In this article, we investigate the emergence of NUM in 2015, and the first three marches in 2015, 2016, and 2017. The data gathered on Twitter conversations are analyzed to explore how the topics (VAW and femicide) have been appropriated by Argentinean feminists and women’s movements through the technopolitical use of social media. The fundamental elements of our framework are as follows: a detailed description of the social circumstances that scaled up the murder of one individual woman into a topic of public concern; an analysis of the collective effervescence produced by a successful call to an imaginary community of women counter-hegemonic to the dominant macho culture; an analysis of the changing nature of the NUM, from a non-formalized group of activists, to a colectivo, and finally to a leaderless network movement; an interpretation of tweets, which set the ground for mobilization across sectors of society and visibility of VAW as femicide background. For analytical purposes, the article isolates Twitter conversations. Although other social media were used, and online/off-line connections promoted participation in the marches, Twitter’s features made it the privileged arena for analyzing the technopolitical use of social media by journalists, politicians, activists, and individual citizens.

The article is organized as follows. In the first section, we describe NUM in the making, namely, the evolution of the movement that was behind the hashtag. In the second section, we illustrate the power of femicide to mobilize both activists and individual citizens. In the third section, we take an in-depth look at how grassroots movements, especially Latin American women’s movements, use social media. The methodology adopted in the study, and the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the database, occupy the core of the article. In conclusion, we highlight the effective combination of femicide narrative, the Argentinean human rights tradition, and Twitter usages in turning VAW into a general civic concern.

NUM in the Making

So far, a small but growing corpus of studies has focused on the Argentinean NUM.¹ Chenou and Cepeda (2019) look at how bottom-up Big Data collection and analysis (i.e., data activism), and the consequent VAW index, have been an integral part of NUM’s political and discursive strategies. Luengo (2018) explores how news outlets reported the NUM 2015 march and amplified its frames. Batista and colleagues (2017) analyze the frequency of VAW in Facebook, Twitter, and blogs at the time of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women 2015 (i.e., in the strand of NUM mobilizations). Laudano (2017) focuses on the feminist appropriation of social media between 2015 and 2016. But what is NUM? How was it born? And how has it evolved?

In early 2015, online and off-line protests against femicide and VAW were organized by different actors. Groups of young feminists convened in Buenos Aires the first “siluetazo” (the silhouettes of murdered women sketched on the ground, similar to those of the desaparecidos during the dictatorship). A group of journalists launched the online campaign “Fed up with reporting femicides. As journalists, we say #StopViolence,” while another group of journalists and writers organized a marathon of public readings, which inaugurated the “Ni Una Menos” slogan and the eponymous Facebook page. When a 20-year-old girl’s video denouncing street harassment became viral on YouTube, the first “Native women march for buen vivir/good living” paraded to denounce violence suffered by indigenous women. In this context, the sheer cruelty of Páez’s murder was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

After Ojeda’s tweet and the hashtag’s launch, the Facebook account was reactivated, a Twitter account was created, and #NiUnaMenos became a trending topic. Two groups of women separately managed each account but merged into a single 20-people core group. NUM thus evolved from being a catchphrase to a colectivo (a joint effort of activists who operate with a horizontal, egalitarian organization, mostly around a single issue or tightly knit set of issues). Most of the core group members were journalists who had not previously worked with grassroots organizations. Some of them supported the Kirchner government, whereas others opposed it; however, despite strong political and professional differences, they were able to transcend internal conflict and successfully organize the 2015 march. In the aftermath of the march, feminists appropriated the slogan. On one hand, they flourished across the entire country under the name of NUM, which upscaled from colectivo in Buenos Aires to a national network; on the other hand, they pollinated public discourses with characteristic feminist topics, such as criticism of the patriarchy and women’s inequality, which had not predominated within the parameters of the original colectivo. That is to say, NUM, in a similar way as other Latin American women’s movements (Revilla Blanco, 2019), evolved into a relatively structured movement including different actors and claims, and changed the nature of the collective events occurring in the public sphere by diversifying the repertoire and spaces for activism/participation.

In fact, in 2016, the march was much more organized and heterogeneous in terms of topics and participation. At this time, the original core group integrated scholars and activists, and worked parallel to an NUM movement, which networked a wide variety of social organizations and local colectivos, so that both content and practices were cross-pollinated. As with other hashtag-driven movements (Kim, 2017; Myles, 2019), in Argentina too, initial debates focused on femicide and VAW, while conversations shifted over time to invoke #NiUnaMenos as “the mother tag” for wider political purposes, such as the state’s responsibility for VAW impunity, legalizing abortion, balancing the gender pay gap, improving conditions of women in prisons, recognizing sex workers, and/or emancipating women from sexual slavery. On the contrary, whereas grassroots feminism intervened in neighborhoods, intellectual production proliferated, and the first “tuitazo” (i.e., mass sending of tweets specifically labeled or with a forceful content) inviting every woman to share (with a tweet, but also on Facebook) her own experiences and motivations to join the movement was called. In this transformation, the NUM has fostered new political practices (e.g., the immediate concentration on the streets for each new femicide reported; cohesive assemblies, despite conflicts and differences; lack of leadership; and public disclosure of personal experiences) and combined multiple communication practices (e.g., hashtag and activism, “twitazos,” marches, live radio broadcasting, public readings, and other outdoor artistic performances).

From the 2016 march, some milestones have consolidated the mass size and transversality of the movement, thus enhancing its transformative scope. In particular, the National Meeting of Women (held in Rosario, in October) and the following Black Wednesday (a 1-hr strike and mass mobilization in reaction to another brutal femicide) represented a turning point: the former galvanized women who therefore came to the latter aware that women’s deaths also stop production (i.e., the economic issue had been incorporated into the NUM’s claims). March 8, 2017 was also a qualitative leap in networking the movement to other international mobilizations. An entire day of women’s strikes highlighted the link between the physical violence on women’s bodies and the system to which it belongs. Thus, NUM arrived at the 2017 march having matured: both the collective discussion and organization entered a phase of decentralization and internationalization, and the multiple implications of VAW gained more emphasis.

The Mobilizing Force of Femicide

The term femicide was coined in the mid-1970s, but in the past decade, it has gained traction among an international community of researchers and activists in the context of gender violence prevention and women’s fight for human rights and safety. As a comprehensive concept, it has transformed conventional perception and public awareness around the phenomenon by emphasizing how multiple settings and factors shape it (Corradi et al., 2016). In many regions of the world, femicide proved to be a compelling keyword and mobilized people. In Italy, since 2011, the term has fostered the resurgence of women’s movements, such as Se Non Ora Quando?, which channeled Italian women’s frustration at being objects of violence (Elia, 2016), or the more recent Non Una di Meno, which has relaunched a public discourse on VAW by borrowing key foreign signifiers and endorsing international campaigns (Trillò, 2018). In Korea, the brutal murder of a woman in Seoul triggered responses from young women, which quickly evolved into a feminist social justice project (Lee, 2018). In India, the local phenomena of female feticide and dowry deaths drew public attention to the wider problem of femicide (Weil & Vom Berg Mitra, 2016).

For activists, using the notion ultimately meant helping reverse patriarchal power according to the feminist perspective that femicide and gender violence are the outcome of a male-dominated culture where women’s oppression is structural and institutionalized (Taylor & Jasinski, 2011). This is the reason why, in the mid-1990s, the English term “femicide” was popularized and transmuted into the Spanish “feminicidio” by Mexican feminists, who sought to incorporate a much more political meaning, while drawing national and international attention to the murder of hundreds of girls and women in the towns of Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua (Monárrez Fragoso, 2008). According to Lagarde y de los Ríos (2008), feminicidio is not just the female equivalent of homicide, but reveals the misogynist grounds of the crime, the authorities’ negligence, and the cultural and sociopolitical conditions normalizing gender violence. Therefore, for activists, using this new feminist concept was instrumental in raising awareness about the misogynist grounds of violence, the vulnerability of women and girls, and the imbalance of power between men and women in Mexican society, through a single term (Hernández García & Coutiño Osorio, 2016). As García-Del Moral (2015) highlights, feminicidio worked as a resonant and radical frame for political struggle at both international and national levels by appealing against VAW as a violation of human rights and denouncing its trivialization and normalization as well as the victims’ pain.

Such an appropriation of femicide as a keyword is consistent with the main features of women’s activism in Latin America. First, it has given public visibility to practices and situations (e.g., domestic and intimate partner violence, caring activities, and sexualities) that were historically considered as private, according to the argument that “the personal is political,” thus sustaining alternative discourses and generating new counter-audiences (Laudano, 2017; Sardenberg, 2008). Second, Latin American women’s movements have been historically characterized by internal tensions (Alvarez, 1999; Stromquist, 2007/2016), but activists have always succeeded in making their claims visible under unitary names, symbols, and goals (Jaquette, 1994/2018; Vargas, 2015). Such a unity has been even clearer in recent years, when Latin American women’s activists have been networking actions and agendas both locally and transnationally by sharing frames and slogans (Baksh & Harcourt, 2015; Eschle, 2018). In this context, digital media have been playing a pivotal role as they concretely enable a transnational, networked feminism (Fotopoulou, 2016; Youngs, 2015), especially when online discussion and organization deal with VAW (Kurian et al., 2015), which occupies 50% of social media content on gender throughout the region, while gender equality ranks 30% (Batista et al., 2017).

The Tactical and Expressive Use of Social Media by Grassroots Movements

Overall, digital and social media have become constitutive of contemporary grassroots movements (Bakardjieva, 2015). Specifically, in Latin America, they have been integrated by grassroots movements both for organizing and networking collective actions as well as for expressing identity claims (Harlow & Harp, 2013; Trerè & Magallanes-Blanco, 2015). Through horizontal online sharing, grassroots movements can generate personalized contents and distribute them to a potentially global and local audience, across media networks where digital media are organizing agents for practical and expressive purposes (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Castells, 2009). Communication technologies have been appropriated to the point that collective actions unfold sequentially from online spaces to physical ones, and vice versa (Toret et al., 2015). In fact, we consider digital media and political struggles as mutually shaped according to a noninstrumental understanding of the relations between technology and politics that makes social media platforms a relevant arena in which to analyze the NUM claims. In rejecting the idea that online and off-line domains should be considered as completely separated, we agree with Vaccari et al. (2015) in valuing online activism as effort or commitment, as nowadays “publics are networked digitally, but connected discursively” (Papacharissi, 2014, p. 5). And especially, when VAW comes into play, digital activism is far from being low intensity as it engages users on a deeply emotional level (Mendes et al., 2019).

The pioneering experiments of online women’s activism have gradually led to the material and symbolic appropriation of digital media by a larger number of women. In Argentina, for instance, initially women’s groups and NGOs used emails, electronic conferences, and information distribution lists, whereas later they created discussion lists on specific gender-related themes (Rosales & Rímaro, 2009), which have finally been complemented by a tactical use of social media with emphatic and viral contents (Laudano, 2017). Social media are additional “environments” (boyd, 2011) where activists and interested people can discuss issues, share ideas, organize activities, and perform individual and collective identities. Indeed, social media are also “the sites where new collective names, icons, and slogans have been . . . forged” (Gerbaudo & Treré, 2015, p. 865). A similar pattern seems to be applicable to NUM, which can be described as a network of individuals and clusters who join for a common cause (i.e., to struggle against femicide and VAW), without removing internal differences or excluding some categories of participants. Furthermore, social media supply individuals with support, sociability, information, and a sense of belonging. Such “network ties” are needed for mobilizing participants as they are “complementary to collective identity” (Ivi, p. 867), which also seems to be at stake in NUM, where a strong sense of belonging to the cohort of women emerges. Finally, adhesion to protests also implies propagating the emotions attached to the events through multimodal digital networks of horizontal communication (Castells, 2009). Digital enthusiasm and online emotional contagion play a pivotal role in fostering mass protest participation as they provide purpose and motivations to mobilizations (Gravante, 2016), and technology is needed for catalyzing them before, during, and after mobilizations (Papacharissi, 2014; Treré & Barranquero, 2018). NUM is not an exception as the hashtag itself and the whole communication campaign have relied on a genuine appeal to emotions that has been sustaining mobilizations year by year.

Therefore, the Argentinean NUM’s protest practices have been constitutively and successfully based on the technopolitical use of social media by activists who have fed a virtuous exchange between physical (i.e., Encuentros, workshops, panels, and protests) and online meetings, leveraged users’ everyday lives, and built powerful regional “affective solidarity” and “counter-publics” (Friedman, 2017; Mendes et al., 2019). While raising consciousness, NUM’s activists have been performing identity and activism at the same time, thus resembling other recent hashtag-driven movements (Boyle, 2019; Gleeson & Turner, 2019). The added value of this appropriation of social media by women and feminists is actually that they have imbued such platforms with their own values and tailored them to their own claims and needs. They harness social media to share personal experiences and, thus, blur the public/private boundaries of civic engagement. On closer inspection, it is consistent with both the feminist slogan “the personal is political” and the process of “identization” characterizing the movements that are based on common values and claims rather than on identities (Kavada, 2015; Kim, 2017). These elements are at stake also in the Argentinean NUM, which has been cohesive, regardless of political and socioeconomic differences, precisely for making VAW and femicide problems of public concern. NUM’s activists have been exploiting what Chen et al. (2018) call “the energizing aspect” of digital tools, which have been “drawing women together online” within “intimate publics” (p. 200). Particularly, “hashtag activism”—that is, “fighting for or supporting a cause with the use of hashtags . . . to raise awareness of an issue and encourage debate via social media” (Tombleson & Wolf, 2017, p. 15)—has proved to be an effective discursive tactic for them. The #NiUnaMenos hashtag was a compelling narrative agent that has fueled its own growth (Clark, 2016; Yang, 2016). It has allowed more and more women to (self-)publish and interconnect personal concrete experiences to the extent that the political and cultural aspects of VAW acquired a collective value redefining the function of testimony in terms of agency (Bayne, 2018; Boyle, 2019; Loney-Howes, 2019; Núñez Puente et al., 2019). Since then, the hashtag has also framed discussions around issues related to the movement and, in doing so, has affiliated individuals by engaging them in the co-creation of their salience (Xiong et al., 2019). Actually, “hashtag feminism” comes to label and classify content around gender-related topics, thus reifying the movements, mainstreaming feminist discourses, and reshaping the cultural consensus about them (Myles, 2019). And all these features do recur in the NUM, especially if we look at the way it evolves and circulates.

Method

According to its descriptive and exploratory objectives, the research integrates quantitative and qualitative methods. We collected all the tweets carrying the hashtag #NiUnaMenos produced in Spanish within the Buenos Aires time zone between June 1 and June 3 in 2015, 2016, and 2017 (292,700 tweets).

We decided to focus on Twitter conversations for several reasons. First, NUM gained initial visibility through the launch and the viralization of the related hashtag which, in 2015, was mainly used as a Twitter feature. Although Facebook was the most used social network in the country at the time and the hashtag immediately spread there (Laudano, 2017), in the 3 years on which we focused, Twitter accounts for the second most-used social network site. According to We Are Social (2015, 2016, 2017), in 2015, its penetration was 15% (Facebook: 35%, Instagram: 9%); in 2016, it was 18% (Facebook: 42%, Instagram: 16%), and in 2017, it reached 47% (Facebook: 75%, Instagram: 45%). Second, Twitter is widely recognized by media and internet scholars as a privileged research arena, with special regard to (a) conversations related to political and civic engagement, due to the public nature of the “overwhelming majority of Twitter profiles and their posts” (Bruns, 2019, p. 3), as well as to the very nature of hashtag conversations, which allow for large-scale thematic conversations, without the need for the users to share any previous connection; (b) real-time or quasi real-time conversation, thus supporting protest events from an organizational point of view, as well as a way for spreading ideas and gaining visibility among mainstream media and broader public opinion (Bruns, 2019, p. 3); and (c) the (initial) high accessibility of Twitter data (through its application programming interface [API], or through dedicated services), which allowed us to gather a large amount of public data. Finally, Twitter allowed us to explore whether/how different decentralized users exchanged information, opinions, and emotions within their own social networks of contacts (Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira, 2012) as it is there that they engage in horizontal conversational practices while creating thematic categories shaping the exchange (Theocharis et al., 2015).

Conversely, the choice of combining the language (Spanish) and the time zone (Buenos Aires) allowed us to geographically circumscribe the area of our interest to Argentina as this is the country where the movement was born (the small minority of tweets produced in bordering Spanish-speaking countries were manually removed whenever geographic information was available). Finally, we limited the temporal window to the day of the march and the two previous days in every year under consideration, conceiving them as the moment of the greatest intensity of social media activity where we could better track how and to what extent users commented on femicide and gender violence.

Specifically, tweets relating to the first and second years were gathered after the marches through the GNIP “Historical Power Track,” whereas the 2017 tweets were collected live through the Twitter API. Each year, we carried out quantitative data analysis, focusing on activity metrics, patterns of influence and information spread, tweet flow variation over time, “unique users,” tweets per user average, and hashtag spread through retweet and URL. Such analyses are well established in literature focusing on Twitter, and allow us to give an account of the conversations (in terms of patterns of influence, user engagement with the topic, relations between Twitter conversations and the off-line movements), as well as to compare this data set with other data sets focusing on similar topics. We also analyzed @users and identified the most influential among them, by focusing on “mentions” and “retweets,” which might be considered as a proxy for influence on other users, and on the whole conversation (Cha et al., 2010). Then, we selected the most popular tweets including 0.01% of each yearly database to consider the tweets that mostly contributed both to the conversations and to the hashtag dissemination. More specifically, the selected popular tweets were retweeted on the whole 593,229 times in 2015, 155,250 times in 2016, and 92,088 in 2017. While most of the aforementioned retweets do not fit the criteria we selected for constituting our data set (in terms of time span or location), this high number of retweets testifies to their significance. Based on the data at our disposal, we calculated the tweet popularity as the mere sum of the RT count and favorites for 2015 and 2016, and as the mere RT count for 2017 (as the data collected in the past year did not account for the favorites received by each tweet). We carried out a thematic analysis of the sample (Boyatzis, 1998; Braun & Clarke, 2006). Tweets were analyzed to generate initial codes. The coding process was conducted first separately and then jointly by the researchers, who largely discussed tweets whose coding appeared problematic or ambiguous, as well as the semantic boundaries of the identified categories. Codes were collated into potential themes; themes were reviewed and a thematic map was generated. According to Boyatzis (1998), “a theme is a pattern found in the information that at the minimum describes and organizes possible observations or at the maximum interprets aspects of the phenomenon” (p. vii). Finally, we cleaned the categories to keep only the most significant (although an analysis of the residual ones has been sketched out and, it is worth noting, being-residual is an interesting datum in itself). Thematic analysis allowed us to grasp the characteristics of NUM-related conversations, identifying both constant and varying patterns, including the prevailing issues discussed online, the goals of the most popular tweets, and the communication style adopted. We also selected the pictures that, year after year, were frequently attached to the most popular tweets to compare them and graphically illustrate the evolution of Twitter conversations we account for.

Throughout the presentation of the results, we shall mention the @names of the users who, therefore, will not be anonymous, because of the relevance of user characterizations for research purposes. Moreover, “Twitter users understand that posts made by their non-protected Twitter accounts are publicly visible” and “gathering profile and post data from Twitter without the express personal consent” is widely accepted by researchers in terms of ethics and privacy (Bruns, 2019, p. 3).

Analysis of the Database

From the quantitative point of view, consistent with social media scholarship (Weller et al., 2014), we focused on some Twitter basic activity metrics: tweet distribution over time, user activity and influence, and tweet popularity. The first dimension contributes to understanding the relation between Twitter conversations and the exact time of the marches: Was Twitter mainly used as an organizational and promotional tool for the marches? Was it mainly used for live-tweeting during the marches, or instead, in the days before? The second dimension (the focus on users) aims at understanding the spread of the hashtag, as well as patterns of influence in Twitter conversations, and might be considered as a proxy for user “engagement” with the hashtag conversation: Was the hashtag mainly supported by a small active number of users, or rather, by a broader user base mainly constituted by “occasional” tweeters? The third dimension (tweet popularity) aims at highlighting the most popular tweets and helped to select the tweets that underwent qualitative analysis.

Overall, the hashtag #NiUnaMenos reached its highest level of popularity in 2015, in terms of both number of tweets and number of accounts using the hashtag at least once; this popularity appears to decrease in the following 2 years. As shown in Table 1, in 2015, more than 158,000 tweets meeting our criteria were produced, which is more than double the number of tweets produced in 2016 (approximately 69,000, 43.65% of the 2015 amount) and 2017 (approximately 64,000, 40.87% of the 2015 amount), respectively. A similar pattern is found in the number of unique users, which decreases in 2016 and 2017: approximately 67,000 unique users in 2015; 31,000 in 2016 (46.86% of the users in 2015); and approximately 29,000 in 2017 (43.71% of the users in 2015).

Table 1.

Tweets and Unique Users Over the Years.

Analytics	2015	2016	2017
Number of tweets	158.625	69.241	64.834
Number of users	67.342	31.560	29.437

Tweet Distribution Over Time

Figure 1 shows the tweet distribution over time in 2015, covering the time span from June 1-3 (from 00.00-23.59 p.m.). Consistent with research on the role of Twitter in protests, which has shown that the platform is likely to be used as a real-time communication tool (Bruns, 2019), the majority of tweets were produced during the day of the march, allowing people to enact their engagement online while the march was going on. If we exclude night time, a significant share of activity took place throughout the entire day, with a smaller peak in the evening before the march; in the preceding days, however, Twitter activity appears low. This means that Twitter activity peaks are not strongly related to organizational aspects, but rather to the appropriation and real-time narration of the march by participants.

Figure 1.

Tweet distribution over time, 2015.

A similar pattern can be highlighted in 2016 (Figure 2), with a majority of tweets produced throughout the day of the march (June 3) and a smaller but significant peak during the evening preceding the march. Although activity during the previous days is low, small peaks can be registered on both days.

Figure 2.

Tweet distribution over time, 2016.

In 2017 (Figure 3), more than half of the whole database (about 39,000 tweets) was produced during the march (between 16:00 and 23:00 p.m., June 3). A smaller peak was registered on the evening preceding the march and another one at 13:00 p.m., June 3.

Figure 3.

Tweet distribution over time, 2017.

Overall, tweet distribution over time in each of the 3 years shows similar patterns as tweet production mainly takes place on the day of the march, with smaller peaks on the preceding evening. Nevertheless, when compared with 2017, tweet distribution in 2015 appears more even, as a large number of tweets were registered throughout the whole day, and the peak on the preceding evening covers a relatively higher share of the database. With 2015 being the “launch” year of NUM, users might have been more engaged in promoting both the hashtag and the movement itself. In 2017, however, Twitter activity is disproportionately confined to the hours during which the march took place. This means that in 2017, the collective effervescence effect seems weaker, as it is limited to the hours of the march. Whereas the “direct witnessing” function and live-tweeting activities prevail in each of the 3 years, in 2015 and 2016 there seems to be at least some more room for tweets written in preparation for the march (be they organizational, promotional, or substantive).

User Activity

In 2015, more than 67,000 unique users contributed to the hashtag conversations during the time span we analyzed. On average, each user contributed 2.36 tweets to the data set (Table 2). The most active user produced about 1,500 tweets, contributing almost 1% of the entire database, while 10% of the database was produced by the 281 most active users (0.41% of users) and the most active 1% of users (n = 672) accounts for about 15.25% of all tweets. In contrast, the number of users contributing only one tweet was 41,186 (61.24%), whereas 12,027 users produced two tweets: Overall, those whom we could define as “occasional” tweeters in this database account for 79.13% of total users. In 2016 and 2017, user metrics follow similar patterns, with a minimum increase in “occasional” users and a slight decrease in the share of tweets produced by the most active 1% of users (the latter might also be influenced by the absence of the single very active user otherwise present in 2015 and accounting for almost 1% of the entire data set).

Table 2.

User Metrics.

Metrics	2015	2016	2017
Tweet per user (avg)	2,36	2,19	2,20
“occasional” users (%)	79,13	80,6	82
% of tweets by the single most active user	1	0,4	0,38
% of tweets by the most active 1% users	15,25	13,2	14

Overall, our data set only shows a slight domination by the most active users and a more distributed communication pattern, with a larger base of relatively active users. But this is a countertrend compared with other Twitter data sets. In fact, according to Bruns and Stieglitz (2014), a less pronounced domination by leading users usually accounts for data sets related to pop culture and other viral phenomena, whereas data sets related to a sociopolitically sensitive hashtag, which #NiUnaMenos is, tend to be dominated by lead and highly active users. This difference is related, on one hand, to the nature of the movement, which is “leaderless,” to the point that some users added “NiUnaMenos” to their nickname, which confirms the idea that a large population might be willing to appropriate, even graphically, the claim and, hence, feel the agency to speak in the name of the movement. This is consistent with the aforementioned evolution of NUM, which evolved from a colectivo to a leaderless multicentric network. On the other hand, such a difference also shows that individual users did not experience extremely high levels of communicative engagement with the hashtag.

To “provide an evaluation of the visibility and importance of each user to those of their peers who actively send tweets in the datasets” (Bruns & Stieglitz, 2014, p. 73), we also analyzed user mention[s] and retweets received by each user. Accordingly, we highlighted the most mentioned accounts in the three data sets. The total number of user mentions in the 2015 data set is 137,112, with 66.9% of tweets containing at least one mention (and a couple of tweets reaching the number of 10 mentions). Consistent with data set size, the total number of user mention[s] in the following 2 years is smaller, namely, 69,241 in 2016, and 70,562 in 2017. The most mentioned users in 2015 are @NiUnaMenos_ (the official account of the movement), @CFKArgentina ‏(Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, at that time president of Argentina), @elcosodelapizza (a satirical account), and @todonoticias (a press agency). In 2016, the most mentioned accounts are @C5N (a national mainstream TV channel), @natijota (a young journalist with a large follower base), and @NiUnaMenos_. In 2017, the most mentioned user is @fenomenoide (a feminist illustrator), followed by @MalenaMassa ‏(a party councilwoman), and @CFKArgentina (former president of Argentina, no longer in the office in 2017).

The accounts @NiUnaMenos_ and @CFKArgentina appear among the three most mentioned accounts in 2 of the years, while other top-mentioned accounts include public figures, journalists, or media outlets, all having a medium-large or large follower base. Celebrities and media outlets had a much higher visibility among the users actively contributing to the hashtag, which seems to be related to the higher number of followers they usually have. Nevertheless, the number of followers is not the only important factor in determining user influence on Twitter. Creating highly engaging and/or informative content, engaging in conversations with influential users, an effective and timely usage of hashtags, and other structural features of the platform also play an important role. This is the reason why some “common users” also appear among the broader list of the 100 most visible and important users, despite having a much smaller number of followers than celebrities and Twitter celebrities. This is consistent with the leaderless nature of NUM. Another reason why celebrities and media outlets earned high levels of visibility might be related to the fact that NUM addresses a sensitive sociopolitical topic and, therefore, users are likely to be interested in public figures’ opinions.

Tweet Popularity

With regard to the most influential tweets, 58% of the 2015 data set and 66% of that of 2016 are composed of tweets that are a retweet of another tweet (including retweets of retweets), whereas the data collection procedure adopted for 2017 does not provide such information. A high share of retweets can be related to what Bruns and Stieglitz (2014) defined as a “process of collaborative curation of information on the hashtag topic through gatewatching” (p. 80). In fact, the authors found that in data sets related to different political and civic mobilizations, the percentage of retweets was mainly between 40 and 60%, whereas data sets related to simple political discussion (as opposed to mobilization) showed a lower rate. Therefore, the retweet rate in our data set is consistent with such previous findings and interpretation, as NUM is a form of civic mobilization in relation to which people appear willing to engage in forms of collective content curation. Furthermore, by retweeting, people appropriate the topics (VAW and femicide), while widening the mobilization and giving further visibility to the reasons that lead to it.

Thematizing the Tweets

From a qualitative point of view, through a thematic analysis of the most popular tweets, we aimed to characterize NUM, year by year, thus identifying the constant features as well as those varying over time.

The “Launch”: Gender Violence Is Your Business

The year 2015 is the birth year of NUM as a movement, which relaunched a public discussion about VAW by focusing on its most brutal form committed when killing a woman. This first year is the (online and off-line) “launch” of NUM, which is discursively driven by the term feminicidio and the related #NiUnaMenos hashtag. In this context, popular tweets critically highlighted the dominant macho culture, while disputing it and thus building a counter-hegemonic discourse. For instance, the most popular tweet (6,201 interactions including favorites and retweets) referred to a text by the Argentinean writer Juan Solá, provocatively and self-deprecatingly entitled You fucking bitch, which appeared on his Facebook page in June. The author self-critically speaks as a man brought up in a sexist culture as a macho and empathically asks for forgiveness from women for the fear they suffer when being approached by men in everyday situations, such as crossing the road or getting on the bus. He cannot understand what being permanently exposed to sexist harassment means as men do not suffer from it, but they should not deny their own violent gestures. The text finishes by calling on men to participate in the march in the name of those women who are important in their own lives, such as mothers, daughters, and sisters, to redefine not only the meaning of being a woman but also of being a man.

Such a text encapsulates many of the main claims made by the other most popular tweets before and during the 2015 march. In fact, Twitter conversations mainly appeal to the emotions and the universal character of VAW by explicitly referring to the proximity of the problem. This is an NUM discursive strategy aimed at overcoming the idea that VAW is a personal/private problem, but instead affects the whole society (García-Del Moral, 2015; Luengo, 2018). It involves sisters, mothers, and daughters, and occurs daily when women are restricted in their freedom of movement or clothing due to the fear of being harassed and intimidated by men.

@Frasesrockarg5: For your sister, your grandmother, your mother. For all the women you mostly love in your life, that’s why² @LuisiLpda: I do not want to feel brave when I go out on the street, I want to feel free.

Specific references to the problem of sexist street harassment and to the importance of not blaming the victim for short skirts, casual lifestyle, or emancipatory attitudes are quite frequent.

@tanmorochas: If the skirt was short or if she hangs out every weekend, NOTHING gives to ANYONE the right to take the life of another person. @unamadresoltera: If she does not want to come back with you, it does not make her a whore. If she thinks about herself and her future, it does not make her a bitch.

In this context, it is not surprising to see the presence, albeit marginal, of fairly popular tweets defending the specificity of the implications of being a woman, thus marking a difference between VAW and violence as a general problem. There is no lack of reflective tweets requiring a redefinition of masculinity, precisely by dissociating it from the exercise of violence.

@Frasesrockarg5: Only a coward hurts a woman. @GusSastre: The Man who HURTS, HUMILIATES, MISTREATS or KILLS, does not deserve to be called Man!

More generally, popular tweets often recall the reasons for the march; among them, the different forms of VAW (e. g., verbal and physical abuses or controlling behaviors). This can also explain the presence, though marginal, of tweets that refer to unhealthy forms of love, which enable both domestic and intimate partner violence.

@unamadresoltera: Gender violence is not only based on physical blows. The blows to the heart and to the psyche also count. AND A LOT. @belisamacedo: he gets angry, screams at you and, with any excuse, breaks everything while insulting you. And then he hugs you crying, and asks for forgiveness.

Among the most popular tweets referring to the reasons underlying the mobilization are the texts of the official account of the movement (@NiUnaMenos_), publicizing the five points of the public commitment demanded of institutions and politicians. They request, respectively, (a) the implementation of the National Plan of Action for Prevention, Assistance, and Eradication of VAW; (b) easy access to the judicial system for victims, trained personnel to register their accusations, a supportive judicial mechanism, and free legal defense; (c) an Official Registry of victims of VAW to assess the problem and, hence, design effective public policies; (d) the implementation of Comprehensive Sex Education at all educational levels and relevant training for teachers and heads; and (e) victim protection by electronic monitoring of the perpetrators. In doing so, the official account moved the topic of VAW from a private issue to a public one.

These points and claims are also spread via the popular tweets which, live from the squares, report the public reading of the official document of the movement or some interviews with its main spokespersons. As argued by Luengo (2018, p. 409), public readings and their media coverage ensured a “high level of effectiveness” as they “presented the deaths of individual women as part of a collective story of femicide” by framing them through the human rights discourse. For instance, a tweet linked to the information portal “TodoNoticias” reports the Argentinean actor Juan Minujín reading the official text of the repudiation act against gender violence. Furthermore, a tweet of the mainstream TV channel “El trece” reports an interview with activists directly from Buenos Aires, a few minutes before the march started.

@todonoticias: #NiUnaMenos and a unanimous request: “We don’t want any more women dead.” http://t.co/HCkn49Pozf

@eltreceoficial: #NiUnaMenos: Today at 5pm, at the National Congress. http://t.co/T6RzhTEc5y

Other popular tweets invoke institutions and parties, but by highlighting the contradictions of the Kirchner government or by denouncing institutional responsibility for the perpetration of gender violence. A tweet even asks politicians not to manipulate the march for electoral interests.

@sebakatz: Cristina joins the march that asks Cristina to regulate a law approved in 2009, during the presidency of CRISTINA

@AngeldebritoOk: Every woman who dies is responsibility of Congress and Justice. Remember it when you vote.

Nevertheless, such a polemical tone is not a dominant feature in 2015, which is, rather, quite proactive. In fact, there are many popular tweets that foster participation in the march by promoting the concentration of meetings throughout the country and by advertising the participation of well-known personalities from the world of sport, culture, and entertainment.

@BocaJrsOficial (Argentinian football team): Boca joins the fight against gender violence throughout the country, through @BOCASocialcabj

@SerranoIsmael (Spanish songwriter): Stop macho violence. My solidarity with those who today march against this scourge in different Argentinian cities.

There are also tweets that enthusiastically highlight the mass participation in the march or its repercussions at the international level. A tweet even mentions news related to mobilizations that simultaneously arose in Chile and Uruguay, thus valuing the international repercussions of the march.

We recorded a large use of different kinds of images (as exemplified by Figure 4), which evoke a community of women counter-hegemonic to the dominant macho culture. Some of them are drawings, one of which (representing a little girl with a closed fist) became the actual symbol of the 2015 NUM, while others are images of famous users supporting the movement. Moreover, there are photographs of people and/or posters taken during the march as well as “eloquent” images clarifying the implications of the struggle against VAW and the meaning of keywords, such as machismo, misogyny, and feminism.

Figure 4.

The main images disseminated before and during the 2015 march.

Conversely, numbers and data related to the extent of the femicide phenomenon are scarce among the most popular tweets of the 2015 campaign. Only one tweet links access to the website of the information portal “TodoNoticias” where a short video reports the number of femicides that occurred in Argentina in 2014, the profiles and social roles of the perpetrators, and their main modus operandi. Even tweets related to the organization of the march are scarce, contrary to what we would have expected, considering the key role that social media usually plays in organizing grassroots movements. Such an analysis and the whole characterization of the 2015 NUM highlights that, in the first year, an artistic and proactive dimension predominates when denouncing VAW. It is a movement aiming at emotional contagion (Castells, 2009), whereas the coldness of organization or rawness of data have little importance.

The 2016 “Transitional” Conversations: Existing and New Contents

Many of the above features are also traceable in 2016 conversations, whose contents could be defined as “transitional” in the path toward 2017. Overall, just as in 2015, Twitter conversations give more visibility to the wider issue of gender violence than to the more brutal problem of femicide, thus recalling the specificity of VAW, as in their daily life women suffer social blaming and restrictions to their freedoms.

@natijota: I don’t want to lower my eyes because of shame, when the shame should be of that man who eats me with his eyes.

@unamadresoltera: If the skirt was short, surely she had it coming. Fuck her as a bitch: why did she give him her number? STOP.

Similarly, the need to redefine masculinity is widespread among the 2016 most popular tweets, mainly in terms that are very similar to the ones commented on in 2015 (i.e., the proximity of the problem of gender violence and that being a man does not mean being violent).

@balfederico: Because I am a son, because I am a grandson, because I always respected all the women who were part of my life. Because that’s the way it should be.

@La12tuittera: Hitting a woman does not make you more of a man. Violence leaves marks, not seeing them leaves Femicides.

By exploring more thoroughly the popular tweets that refer to the reasons underlying the mobilization of this second year, reference to the different forms of VAW is less consistent than in 2015, but the few tweets that refer to forms of VAW are more accurate. They focus, for example, on gender bias and sexist language in the media, jealousy and anger, or the economic subjugation of women.

@EcoFeminita: Screaming #NiUnaMenos is also saying NO to this kind of headline #CombatirEstereotipos https://t.co/aZDCXLwo

@DivulgandoRock: Shoust, insults, excessive jealousy and contempt is also violence.

@EdgardoRovira: Types of violence against women: Physical, Psychological, Sexual, Economic and Patrimonial, Symbolic

Therefore, the 2016 tweets referring to the grounds for mobilization seem to be less generic than in 2015, probably because during its first year NUM could have triggered processes of awareness about how gender violence is actually practiced, considering that the movement had already consolidated and gained visibility. Particularly interesting, then, is the following tweet by a woman who, self-critically, recognizes that sexist practices are not a prerogative of men; women too can replicate them because of the patriarchal culture in which we are all embedded.

@unamadresoltera: The #NiUnaMenos also goes for those of us who sometimes are more macho than the men themselves

In this context of hints about what both being a woman and being a man mean, it is not surprising that one of the contents that was most circulated (either in an audiovisual format or written quotations) is the text of Eduardo Galeano entitled The Fearless Woman. The Uruguayan writer argues that men kill women not only because they wrongly think they own women and, hence, can dispose of them “as if it were . . . a matter of private property,” but they do it mostly out of fear; consequently, the daily “woman’s fear of man’s violence is the mirror of man’s fear of woman without fear.” In this text, as in the text by Solá circulated in 2015, there is therefore a heartfelt appeal to the emotional dimension of the problem of VAW, although this time the focus is more specifically on femicide. Once again, it is the artistic dimension of the claim that arouses popularity and draws public attention; once again, a self-critical man fills Twitter conversations by questioning masculinity.

Furthermore, in 2016, there are still tweets that refer to well-known personalities supporting NUM, but this time they are fewer and mainly from the world of politics, such as @Kicillofok (Argentinean politician) ‏and @Pablo_Iglesias_ (Spanish politician) or the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (@abuelasdifusion). In addition, the proactive dimension of the campaign is more nuanced than in 2015. Tweets fostering and/or celebrating participation in the march are fewer and less enthusiastic; rather, tweets of complaint increase. For example, compared with 2015, there are more popular tweets that explicitly mention the number of victims of femicide recorded in the past year.

@fragmentario: Since the first march of #NiUnaMenos there were 275 femicides, in case you were wondering why to do another one.

Even the polemical tone is more pronounced than in 2015. For instance, some tweets blame the manipulative use of NUM by the supporters of the indigenous women’s leader Milagro Sala (a controversial public figure, on charges of fraud and criminal conspiracy in an alleged embezzlement); other tweets disavow the Editorial Group Clarín because of some sexist media content. Some polemical tweets refer to the political situation in Brazil and, more specifically, the then-controversial suspension of President Dilma Rousseff (on charges of having fixed data in the annual budget). All these polemical texts show that NUM, since its origins, has been cohesive when it comes to its identity, which is strongly connected to the fight against VAW and femicide, while being able to host multiple and diverse actors who appropriate the collective space to the point of using it also to make their biased issues visible, even if not shared by all. Tensions and contradictions are intrinsic to a movement that is as molecular and multitudinous as the NUM claims to be; that is, it attempts to be a network of singularities which, instead of being unified, endures as such by asserting what they do share while allowing room for dissonant positions. Finally, we recorded some “service” tweets encouraging others to speak out about known cases of violence and to phone help lines. They reveal a sort of “pragmatic” dimension to the 2016 conversations.

All these characteristics find a figurative transposition in the numerous images (exemplified in Figure 5) often attached to the tweets. Compared with 2015, stylized drawings and square pictures are lacking, while “eloquent” images are still present and graphically summarize much of the textual content analyzed up to now: that is, the proximity of gender violence, its concrete forms and implications, the following of politically important personalities, and the underlying demands of the march, among others.

Figure 5.

The main images disseminated before and during the 2016 march.

Therefore, the 2016 conversations not only consolidate some of the characteristics that had already emerged in 2015, but also introduce new elements that evoke a nascent embitterment that would increase on the occasion of the 2017 march.

The 2017 Harsh Conversations: Femicide, That’s How It Is

In the third year, Twitter NUM-related conversations become harsher: The appeal to emotions does not rely simply on the artistic dimension of denouncing the specificity and proximity of gender violence, but rather focuses on the crueler problem of femicide to which faces and numbers are attached, thus humanizing and giving it a dimension. As Rosales (2016) suggests, it sounds like a sensationalist communicative strategy that appeals to indignation and its collectivization in response to media narratives that are used to trivialize and fictionalize VAW. And such an analysis fits with what Pates et al. (2017) highlight about the Twitter exchanges in the days leading up to the march: The #NiUnaMenos hashtag enables a space where people denounce specific cases of gender discrimination (e.g., mistreatment at work), of missing girls, and intimate partner violence.

Reading the most popular texts exchanged during the 2017 march, we instantly notice an increase of tweets referring to the claim, #VivasNosQueremos (“We Want to Stay Alive”). Consistently, in our whole data set, which is extracted based on #NiUnaMenos, #VivasNosQueremos recurs only once in 2015, 2,235 times in 2016, and 4,398 times in 2017. More generally, there is an increasing reference to the specific problem of femicide, which is, therefore, more present than in previous years, thus matching the wider issue of VAW in terms of visibility level.

@UNICEFargentina: We say enough femicides, enough gender violence. We shout #NiUnaMenos #VivasNosQueremos

@sanchezcastejon: Three women murdered today in our country. Unbearable. Stop this now! https://t.co/Zy

Indeed, among the reasons underlying the 2017 NUM, reference to the various forms of violence decreases, although the few related tweets still refer to the cultural implications of the phenomenon, to the specificity of VAW, and the concrete influence it has on women’s choices.

@MalenaMassa: Today we march because we suffer social, political and economic inequality

@MissInchapable: “[So] the length of my skirt does not define the living of my life”

Conversely, both the previous frames of “not blaming the victim” and the “important women of your/my life” almost disappear. They are replaced by the practice of naming the murdered women, thus giving them a face and a story, different from the anonymous silhouettes in 2015. This very Argentinean practice of naming the victims is probably borrowed from the historical in-circle marches of the Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, who have always mentioned names and surnames of the desaparecidos, thus making them properly presentes.

@fenomenoide: Soledad Morales, 17 years. They raped her, they killed her, they took her scalp and threw her in a pigpen

@fenomenoide: Silvina Nuñez, 3 years. Raped and beaten to death by her stepfather

As a result, Twitter conversations no longer refer only to gender violence or to data, but rather mention real women and girls by identifying who they are, as if there was no longer a need to define or give a dimension to a phenomenon which is now clearly known, but rather the necessity to qualify it in its rawness and account for what is going on. Therefore, the private and personal dimension of femicide fully becomes a public problem, precisely presente. Hence, the appeal to the emotions no longer operates through artistic forms but rather by humanizing the deaths. Unlike in previous years, there are no texts of famous writers circulating among the most popular tweets (although a FanPage video representing young boys as being free from violent or sexist attitudes is quite popular).

Therefore, as the conversations become more serious, it is no wonder that the polemical tone increases. There are texts blaming the media and politicians, as well as texts referring to the controversial case of Milagro Sala and other (national and international) political cases. We even recorded polemical tweets against NUM itself because of its alleged controversial practices.

@santicalise: Help me with RT so that the Argentinian Congress repudiates with unanimity what is happening in Venezuela

@NunkMasKs: WOMEN At #NiUnaMenos talked about the EXTERNAL DEBT, MILAGRO SALA, the 2x1, MADRES and ABUELAS. Did you feel represented?

@lanatoparatodos: I remind Malena (a party councilwoman) who then goes out with the tag #NiUnaMenos that her husband @SergioMassa (Argentinian politician) DID NOT GIVE QUORUM for the law on rapists.

The combination of these features is also graphically translated into the images (summarized by Figure 6) and videos attached to tweets. They represent names and faces of murdered women, demand women’s survival, refer to the social relevance of femicide, and polemically call out politicians.

Figure 6.

The main images disseminated before and during the 2017 march.

Conclusion

There are moments of collective effervescence in the life of societies when the utopian vision of a we becomes real. In 2015, Chiara Páez’s murder had the capacity to condense misogynist motivations, the vulnerability of women and girls, the imbalance of power, and the ineffectiveness of public action into a single term. Femicide functioned as a mobilizing force that has given an unprecedented visibility to the iceberg, VAW, of which it is the tip. As journalists and activists involved in the NUM initially associated femicide with the human rights discourse as a master frame, the keyword claimed to universality and, hence, gained resonance (García-Del Moral, 2015; Luengo, 2018), leveraging Argentina’s tradition of human rights activism and the ineffectiveness of the national regulatory anti-VAW framework. Although the political and social scene was polarized around the dichotomy “pro-Kirchner vs. anti-Kirchner,” the original NUM colectivo unwrapped a unifying consensual space for mobilization by reframing discourses through femicide. From being a topic mostly confined to left-wing feminist activism, femicide became a civil society issue, something which the whole society could be engaged in fighting, beyond any divide. On the contrary, the keyword turned out to be a radical frame, leading a diversified movement that publicly unveiled the trivialization and normalization of VAW, and exposed the pain and personal experiences of the victims. NUM is one of those Latin American women’s movements that, according to Revilla Blanco (2019), have been recently characterized by a progressive, albeit conflictual, inclusion of different identities, the opening of heterogeneous spaces for mobilization and confrontation, and the diversification of the repertoire of activism/participation when VAW comes into play. NUM has effectively combined online and off-line contagion of emotions, digital and traditional communication, mainstream and alternative media, information with entertainment, and performances.

All these processes are traceable in the Twitter conversations we analyzed and account for the intensificaton we highlighted throughout the 3 years. Since the beginning, the #NiUnaMenos hashtag has set the conceptual and virtual boundaries of identity building. Furthermore, in 2015, it proved to be more engaging and appealing than in the following years, because Twitter conversations stressed the universal character of VAW. The artistic-emotional connotation developed in the 2015 conversations was maintained in 2016. Nevertheless, the 2016 conversations initiated an embitterment that became stronger in 2017, when users gave faces and numbers to the specific problem of femicide to humanize and quantify it. We may interpret that as a situation where, in the beginning, femicide needed to be framed and brought to public attention, but in the third year it was well-known and perhaps public indignation increased to the point where people explicitly stated what was going on. Another interpretation is that the embitterment of the online discourses is linked to the need to keep the collective tension on the topic alive and, therefore, to prevent participation fizzling out, as sometimes happens in similar issue-based movements. The images disseminated before and during the marches reflect such an evolution. In 2015, vignettes and illustrations insisted on the appropriation of a public space; in 2016, they tended to display a sense of community; and in 2017, they vociferously expressed feelings of anger and indignation for femicide victims. When taken together, this mass of images portrayed a counter-hegemonic imaginary and a possibility for change.

In this transition, femicide has kept ensuring the digital contagion of emotions through social media by following the radicalization of NUM as a movement with a stronger participation of feminists and women’s grassroots organizations. Throughout this process, the feminist idea of “the personal is political/the private is public” has effectively combined with the human rights frame—as both contributed to extend the problem of VAW to a general matter of democracy and citizenship. This combination has found its natural habitat in social media that, on one hand allow for a pattern of individualized but networked communication and, on the other hand, favor the digital contagion of emotions linked to personal experiences—that is, especially on Twitter, the private–public link that NUM has argued discursively has been reflected. Twitter is a digital space, where the mainstream macho culture and justification of VAW was loudly and creatively contested. In NUM, it proved to be a fundamental medium for civil engagement. In connection with other media as well as off-line activism, it played a decisive role in producing a “civil sphere” (Alexander, 2006), that is, a public space with a degree of autonomy from organized politics, defined by the experience of solidarity. Hundreds of Argentinean women living daily in a sexist society were able to identify with the many murdered women. Twitter conversations and connections between online and off-line transformed public understanding of femicide.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers who contributed, with their comments, to significantly strengthen the analysis. We are also deeply grateful to Claudia Laudano, Argentinean researcher and activist, and to Natalia Hernández Fajardo, activist and journalist at Revista Amazonas, for their insightful reflections about NUM’s evolution.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Francesca Belotti

Notes

Author Biographies

Francesca Belotti is a Postdoctoral Researcher investigating alternative media practices of grassroots organizations, including indigenous communities and women’s movements. She also studies everyday social media usage by older and young people, with a focus on related sexist and ageist stereotypes. Her work is published in Media, Culture & Society; Latin American Perspectives; Ethnicities; and Revista Comunicar, among others.

Francesca Comunello is an Associate Professor of sociology of cultural and communication processes. Her research and publications focus on the intersections between digital technology and society, including digitally mediated social relations, aging and digital communication, gender and ICT, social media, digital communication, and natural disasters. Her work is published in journals such as Media, Culture and Society; The Sociological Review; The Communication Review; and Games and Culture.

Consuelo Corradi is a full professor of sociology in the Department of Human Studies at Lumsa University, Italy. Over the past 10 years, her research has focused on violence against women, femicide, and cross-national studies of policy development on prevention of gender violence. Her work is published in Current Sociology, European Journal of Criminology, Human Studies, and Cultura Latinoamericana, among others.

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