Activist memory narration on social media: Armenian genocide on Instagram

Introduction

Social media is becoming a central arena for varied mnemonic practices (Olick and Robbins, 1998) including activist memory narration, which we define as strategic multimodal storytelling to commemorate “contested pasts outside state channels for the purpose of influencing public debate and political discourse” (Gutman, 2017). In this article, we explore activist memory narration on the Armenians in Lebanon Instagram account (from here on AiL). Specifically, we analyze the following: (a) what strategic memory narratives are put forth by the AiL account managers, (b) how various modes of communication are used in narration and how they attempt to persuade, (c) how audiences are addressed and imagined in the content, (d) how specific audiences respond to it and how their responses are integrated into the storytelling, and (e) how Instagram as a platform shapes the process. We argue that AiL account managers utilize a variety of narrative and social media specific techniques to put forth multimodal memory activist narratives that recount the past so as to serve the diaspora Armenians’ present and future needs. Different audience groups’ messages are dismissed or incorporated into the AiL narrative based on their alignment with the activist impetus. This allows AiL managers to use Instagram to offer a counter-narrative to some audiences, while legitimizing an existing meta-narrative for others.

The Lebanese-Armenian diaspora (~80,000–100,000 people, Sahakyan, 2018) is formed largely by direct survivors of the Armenian Genocide (Kotchikian, 2009)—the mass killing and deportation of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915–1918, which left an estimated 800,000–1.5 million dead (MacDonald, 2008: 118–119). Fewer and fewer of the genocide survivors remain to tell the story, making memory narration on social media increasingly important. While ~3 million Armenians live in the Armenian Republic, the global Armenian diaspora is ~8 million (World Population Review, 2020), and one of the largest waves constituting it followed the genocide (Chaloyan, 2017: 66). The (memory of) the genocide thus sits at the very center of the (diasporan) Armenian identity (Panossian, 2002: 136; Kotchikian, 2009: 465).

Our article contributes to the multidisciplinary project of understanding the entanglement of memory, narrative, activism, and social media practices and extends the ongoing discussions on social media affordances by exploring how Instagram shapes activist memory narration. In the context of growing (post-conflict) diasporas and increasing social media use across the globe, it is necessary to study diasporic memory narration on social media, and AiL offers an under-researched case study. There is limited research on diasporic and activist memory narration on Instagram (cf. Avedissian, 2016; Cherasia, 2020; Commane and Potton, 2018), as well as on Armenian diaspora’s social media practices (cf. Chernobrov and Wilmers, 2019; Gül Kaya, 2017).

We proceed by outlining our conceptual framework for making sense of activist and socially mediated memory narration, then briefly describe our data and methods and go on to presenting findings. We first offer three activist memory narratives and discuss how Instagram’s affordances are utilized for the multimodal framing of the genocide and reparations within these, then explore the AiL account managers practices for engaging audiences and finally describe the instances of AiL activist memory narratives being rejected by some audience members. We conclude with a discussion that teases out further implications of our answered research questions and suggests directions for further research.

Activist memory narration

Memory studies are dominated by the concept of collective memory (Halbwachs, 1980 [1925]), but have more recently been diversified by critiques, which problematize how memory and collectivity are conceptualized (e.g. Hoskins, 2018), and point out that the term has become too much of a catch-all to be analytically useful (Wertsch and Roediger, 2008). We are inspired by work that operates with the language of collective memory, but talk about strategic mnemonic and narrative practices, the combination of which we call activist memory narration. This “enables us to identify ways in which past and present are intertwined without reifying a mystical group mind and without including absolutely everything in the enterprise” (Olick and Robbins, 1998: 112). Our work builds on the significant overlaps in how narrative inquiry, memory studies, social movement/activism studies, and social media studies conceptualize memory, narrative, activism, and networked digitality as well as the entanglements thereof.

Both narrating and remembrance constitute, revise, and edit versions of remembered pasts based on present needs and identities, and for the purposes of desired futures (Riessman, 2008; Wertsch and Roediger, 2008). This creates a “complex temporal overlay rather than a linear progression from past to present to future” (Rigney, 2018: 372). We operationalize this complex temporality with the help of Tenenboim-Weinblatt’s (2013) work on retrospective and prospective memory narration. Retrospective memory narration refers to recollections of past events from the present, whereas prospective memory narration points to remembrance of “what still needs to be done, based on past commitments and promises” (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013: 92). The two types of memory narration are intertwined, “group’s formative stories, myths, values, traditions, and collective traumas” (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013: 101–102) feed prospective memory narration and present agendas.

Narration is—according to narrative scholar Catherine Kohler Riessman (2008)—always designed “for particular recipients—an audience who receives the story, and may interpret it differently” (pp. 8–9) but whom the narrator attempts to persuade using rhetorical skill and a variety of modes of expression. Narratives are co-constructed with their audience even when the audience does not actively partake in shaping the story as the narrators’ expectations of what can or can’t be said (Riessman, 2008: 31) to this audience exerts a crucial influence. Memory narration also serves different purposes for individuals and groups. While individuals narrate to “remember, argue, justify, persuade, engage, entertain, and even mislead an audience,” groups use narratives to do political work, to mobilize others, or to “foster a sense of belonging” (Riessman, 2008: 8). Historian Jay Winter (2006) offers the notion of agents of remembrance (also called memory activists and memory agents in related work), arguing that strategically acting small groups are particularly important for understanding memory narratives that carry weight. Such agents narrate to establish the “truths” of traumatic past events; to honor victims, identify perpetrators; and to battle against alternative narratives from other memory agents (Budryte, 2010: 331). Activist memory narration can thus offer counternarratives and legitimize an existing discourse by connecting “remembrance, memorization and commemoration” (Budryte, 2010: 334). While we do not analyze whether AiL content transforms its audiences’ behavior, we do still utilize the language of activism in as far as we can—in line with narrative inquiry (Riessman, 2008)—glean truth claims and persuasion intensions from both Instagram content, account manager’s statements, and audience comments. According to Richard Perloff (2017), narratives persuade primarily by enlightening and agitating. This is accomplished through framing—selecting aspects of a perceived reality to communicate as more salient.

Finally, narration and narrative interpretation rely on meta-narratives circulating in a particular culture (Riessman, 2008). Budryte (2010) suggests that these meta-narratives are often rooted in large-scale traumatic events. In the context of the study at hand, the meta-narrative is of the Armenian Genocide. As the Turkish government continues to dispute it (Daventry, 2008), two competing meta-narratives of the past arguably exist. One that affirms the genocide, and another that denies it. The affirmative meta-narrative can be argued to further divide in terms of what reparations, if any, should follow genocide acceptance. The political agendas of the Armenians in the Republic have focused more on economic difficulties and regional security, leaning toward cooperation with Turkey, while diasporic agendas have focused on genocide related anti-Turkish sentiment and fears of assimilation (DerGhougassian, 2014; Panossian, 1998).

Multimodal memory narration on social media

How memory narratives are made to matter for present political purposes depends on how the memory is narrated (Doerr, 2014). Activist memory narration often combines different communication modes (e.g. visual, textual, oral), utilizing their polysemous nature toward persuasion (Polletta, 2006). Thus, it is important to question what affordances particular platforms have for strategic, multimodal memory narration.

While most social media platforms share high-level affordances (Bucher and Helmond, 2017) like persistence, replicability, scalability (also called visibility or virality), searchability, and anonymity (boyd, 2010; Halpern and Gibbs, 2013), platforms differ from each other in terms of the range of each affordance. Davis and Chouinard (2017) articulate this range by proposing that platforms can request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage, or refuse actions. Thus, while Twitter and Facebook allow visuality—a photo/video can be added to each post, although the suggested action for posting is to type text; Instagram requests it—the action suggested is to upload a photo. Insta Stories allow textual posting through the “create” function, but the first action suggested remains visual (take and upload photo/selfie). Of course, users can and do put platforms to off-label use (Albury, 2018), but we argue that the text-overlay or non-representative (black square) image practices, for now, remain exceptions that confirm the rule, and Instagram is currently used and perceived as a platform that affords high levels of visuality.

Furthermore, it has been suggested that it is fruitful to analyze affordances for specific practices—in our case, activist memory narration—and as ranging sets (Tiidenberg et al., 2021). We put forth high visuality, mid-range scalability and mid-range interactivity, as Instagram’s set of ranging affordances for activist memory narration. As argued earlier, Instagram requests communication in visual form, and Leaver et al. (2020: 147) have argued that Instagram visuals are “predominantly about affect and communication” and less about “archiving,” even if they do perform both of those functions. Visual communication has a particularly high potential to frame (Krause and Bucy, 2018), persuade (Joffe, 2008), and move audiences to action (Pedwell, 2017). Beyond sharing images and videos, Instagram supports and users intensively utilize emojis. Emoji serve a variety of highly contextual communicative functions that can be utilized in narration (Danesi, 2017; McCulloch, 2019). Most pertinent for our discussion are emoji’s functions as contextualization cues and conversation tools—they are used to engage audiences, indicate approval, and build affinity by acknowledging messages without inviting further discussion, or by signaling there is little to add (Cramer et al., 2016; Kelly and Watts, 2015).

Social media platforms, Instagram included—afford and are interested in circulation of content (scalability) and in people’s engagement with each other’s content (interactivity), as both increase time spent on the platform and thus potential revenue from advertising. However, we argue that compared to social media platforms with built-in reposting features (share, retweet, reblog), Instagram affords mid-range scalability and interactivity, retains a more rigid control over how content scales, and makes account managers more directly responsible for integrating and engaging audiences into their narration. Poell et al. (2016: 1001), call these engagement practices “branding,” which they describe as enhancing user participation through feedback loops as well as choices of language, rhetoric, and interactional style. Account managers utilizing social media branding rely on positive, often first person colloquial, post in languages that perceived audiences are comfortable with, and ask for audience feedback to shape the account’s “activities, rhetoric, and images.” Scalability on Instagram—while aided by algorithmic personalization and recommendation of content in the Discover tab—relies heavily on the account manager’s branding practices, which in the case at hand include direct calls to action and the use of hashtags. Hashtags have both operational and narrative functionality—they are searchable and index content, but are also used to express affinity or frame accompanying visual or textual content (Zappavigna, 2018). Interactivity is driven by the liking, commenting, tagging, direct messaging, and search features, the partial re-posting capacity within Insta Stories, and by account managers branding practices as well as users talking to each other and reacting to content in the form of likes and comments.

Data, methods, and context

“Armenians in Lebanon” is the largest cross-platform Armenian diaspora social media group in Lebanon. At the time of writing, it had ~62,800 followers on Facebook, ~10,700 on Instagram, and 540 on Twitter. These social media accounts are managed by four volunteers. Author A interviewed one of the volunteers—Mr A, who identified himself as the initiator of the AiL social media presence (interview was conducted in Beirut in August 2019), but said that the volunteers regularly collaborate and coordinate what they post in a group chat. According to Mr A, the group uses Instagram specifically for visual storytelling and considers the platform their most up-and-coming social media presence.

Author A—a member of Armenian diaspora—spent 3 months in Lebanon, conducting fieldwork and interviewing diasporic community leaders. This allowed access to the cultural context and Mr A, and became an important resource for our analysis. This was followed by 6 months of ethnographic observation of the AiL account (from November 2019 to April 2020); Author A checked in daily to immerse themselves in the dynamics of posting and commenting, and to familiarize themselves with the topics covered. This further sensitized our coding and analysis. To create the corpus of data, we conducted a close online reading (in April to May 2020) of all AiL posts (391 posts at the time ¹ ; first post 23 April 2015, last post 26 April 2020). We translated all captions into English and coded all posts into non-exclusive thematic categories of Armenian culture, Armenian community in Beirut, Armenian Republic, celebrities of Armenian descent and posts related to genocide.

Within the sample of 391 posts, we identified 103 as “genocide related.” These posts had either direct or implicit visual or textual references to the genocide. Direct visual references included images of genocide marches, the Tsitsernakaberd memorial, visualizations of the genocide on flyers and posters, images of the genocide logo. Direct textual references included captions and hashtags like “Armenian Genocide,” “24th of April,” “1915,” “104 years of remembrance,” references to 1.5 million victims; and hashtags, for example, #ArmenianGenocide #AG1915, #Neveragain1915. Implicit references included mentions of lost lands, intent of destruction by Turks, survival of it by Armenians, for example, “they try to destroy us, but we are still here,” or conveyed general anti-Turkish sentiment. The 24th of April is the official day of genocide commemoration, so every April, AiL content predominantly focuses on the genocide. ² In August 2020, we added an analysis of genocide related Insta Stories saved to Story Highlights. At the time of analysis, this meant two Insta Stories (posted on 24 April 2019 and 2020) that brought together a large number (103 in 2020 ³ and 62 in 2019) of explicitly genocide related posts.

Finally, we conducted visual narrative analysis (VNA) on the 103 genocide related posts and 165 posts in Stories. Our method for VNA relies on Riessman’s (2008) method and Rose’s (2001, 2016) conceptual framework as adjusted for social media analysis by Tiidenberg (2015). Narrative analysis focuses on how the particular narrator “assembles and sequences events and uses language and/or visual images to communicate meaning, that is, make particular points” (Riessman, 2008: 11) to a particular audience. For VNA, Riessman recommends using Rose’s three sites of meaning making—production, image itself, and audiencing. Tiidenberg (2015) incorporates Rose’s (2001) idea of modalities, arguing that on social media, meaning is made in image, video, emoji, caption, hashtag, and comment, but in particular, in the convergence of those. In 2016, Rose added a fourth site of meaning making—circulation—to her model, which we have incorporated into our approach. Thus, we analyzed memory narration in the meanings suggested in visuals and texts, in posts as narrative units and in sequences of posts in Stories and across the entire account, responses of the initial viewers evident in comments, but also the intersection between captions as viewing guides and comments as audience responses, and contextualized this all with information provided by Mr A. The material on AiL account is public, but as the subject matter is contested (Turkish vs Armenian meta-narrative of the past), we are not referring to any usernames and have chosen not to reproduce any images or posts to protect people’s privacy.

Three activist memory narratives

We conceptualize Mr A and the other volunteers managing AiL social media as agents of remembrance (Winter, 2006), who, in their activist memory narration, rely on a diaspora-specific meta-narrative of the Armenian genocide (Budryte, 2010; Riessman, 2008). This starts already in the visual framing of the account—up until the 2020 Beirut port explosion the profile image was the genocide centennial logo, and is confirmed by Mr A. In the interview, “It’s because we are diaspora . . . for us genocide is a big issue,” he says while explaining the purpose of the social media presence. He stresses awareness raising, official recognition and reparations as the more specific genocide related goals of the AiL accounts, indicating the attempt to persuade by agitating and enlightening (Perloff, 2017) as well as putting forth truth claims (Budryte, 2010; Riessman, 2008) to influence public debate and perhaps even political discourse (Gutman, 2017). “It’s to ask our rights, it’s to ask our land, it’s to show the people, to show the world that we are fighting with solidarity against the Ottoman Empire,” he says.

We argue that three activist memory narratives—“Survival,” “Suffering,” and “Never Forget,” are constructed on AiL. All three use visual and textual rhetoric to persuade the audiences to recognize the genocide, but frame the present as well as the implications of the requested recognition differently. We categorize “Survival” and “Suffering,” as retrospective memory narratives, which recollect past events from the perspective of the present, and “Never Forget,” as prospective memory narrative, which remembers what still needs to be done, based on what happened, or was committed to in the past (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013). Although elements of all three narratives might co-occur in specific posts, we differentiate them for analytical clarity. The narratives of “Survival” and “Suffering,” rely on different framings of the present. In the “Survival” narrative, past events are framed as something that can and has been overcome by the Armenian people, while in the “Suffering” narrative they are framed as still causing harm. While these may seem contradictory, they complement each other rhetorically—suffering elevates the people who survive, thus leading to survival elevating the suffering. Furthermore, retrospective memory narration “involves an identity project” (Wertsch and Roediger, 2008: 321), so “Survival” construes a positive “us” of heroic Armenians, and “Suffering” delineates a negative “them” of Turkey. The third, “Never Forget” narrative builds on the truth claims and rhetorical accomplishments of the “Survival” and “Suffering” narratives to more explicitly serve the current agenda and create a bridge to the future.

Survival

In the “Survival” narrative, the Armenian community is depicted as surviving and thriving despite the hardships and more recently despite, or rather in spite of Turkey. This is accomplished through original imagery paired with survival related captions or quotes, but also citational posts that repurpose survival related material for the Armenian cause. For example, in 2015, lines inspired by a Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos were shared: “They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.” In 2019, an image of the genocide commemoration march in Lebanon was posted with a caption: “Our revenge will be to survive! And we did! Proud descendant of an Armenian Genocide survivor.” Both the metaphor of seeds and the rhetoric of survival as revenge extend to AiL audience’s own rhetoric and the 24 April Insta Stories. We observed a recurrence of Tsitsernakaberd selfies overlaid with “#Turkeyfailed” and/or “We are the seeds,” alongside the references to being proud descendants of survivors, for example, #ThirdGenerationSurvivor in the AiL audience posts that the AiL account managers chose to incorporate into the Insta Stories.

Juxtaposition is a common visual technique deployed to convince and emotionally stimulate an audience (Messaris, 1997: 186–187) and in the narrative of “Survival,” the visuality afforded by Instagram is utilized to juxtapose mainly across time. As noted by Panossian (2002), 1915 is foundational to contemporary Armenian identity and from that perspective “Armenian history is divided between ‘before 1915’ and ‘after 1915’” (p. 139); much of the memory narration on AiL follows a similar temporal logic. Armenians of the time of the genocide are visually juxtaposed with the Armenians of today, creating a collective memory narrative of brave Armenians in the process. In 2017, a post consisting of two images—“Armenians in 1915” that shows a black-white photo of children in rags, and “Armenians today,” featuring a mass of people with flags was shared. The contrast between the black and white photo of the distressed children and the intensely colorful photo of the cheery crowd invites the audiences to bear witness and be affected by the phenomenal loss and the awe-inspiring survival (Joffe, 2008; Proitz, 2018). The posts collected into Insta Stories also routinely include upbeat and colorful images of marches and of commemoration, further reinforcing a framing of a vibrant, strong, healthy diaspora, committed to remembrance. This was narrated with particular visual poignancy in the 2020 Insta Story, where 24 frames of various burning candles ⁴ were included, framing the surviving diaspora as both large and committed.

Non-historical, non-genocide related visuals are regularly paired with genocide-related captions or hashtags to narrativize the story of survival at the service of genocide recognition. An image of an Armenian gold medal winner in judo is captioned with the following: “They tried to destroy us but we are still here!.” Within the survival narrative, the Armenian suffering is endowed with heroism. In 2020, a post is made with a quote by Armenian writer Gostan Zarian “Being an Armenian is a merciless task and a heroic enterprise. It is a commandment, a mission, and a destiny that history has imposed on us . . . And we are charged with an awesome responsibility.” According to Zheng Wang (2012: 160) communities with collective trauma often feel that “since they have suffered so much, there must be a deeper meaning to that,” and this theme of meaningful suffering is evident in the narrative of “Survival” on AiL.

Suffering

The second retrospective memory narrative (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013) we found emphasizes Armenian community’s losses in the genocide. Past events are recollected from the perspective of the present where the Armenians are still suffering, primarily due to the lack of recognition of the genocide (cf. Panossian, 2002). Turkey is framed as a clearly negative “them” (Wertsch and Roediger, 2008) in this narrative, both in the past for the genocide and in the present, because of the refusal to recognize it. While all three of Instagram’s key affordances shape this narrative, visuality plays a central role, as the focus is on making rhetorically persuasive and affective truth claims about the past (Joffe, 2008; Krause and Bucy, 2018; Riessman, 2008).

An unsourced post from 2019 features a collage of two maps. The top one is labeled “before” and shows the territory of today’s Turkey cut in half: the Western half is titled Turkey, the Eastern half Armenia. This map is overlaid with a caption “the true map of Armenia before 104 years ago.” The bottom image is the current geopolitical map of the Armenian territory, labeled “after.” This post links genocide to deterritorialization, implicitly connects genocide recognition with territorial claims, and collapses the Ottoman Empire and the modern day Turkey into one negative “them.”

The post highlights how recollections of the past become increasingly mythologized as spatial and temporal distance from what is remembered grows. Unlike what is represented on the “before” map in the Instagram post, modern-day Armenia and Turkey did not exist in 1915—these areas were part of the Ottoman Empire (that lasted from the 13th to 20th century). This conflation of Turkey and the Ottoman Empire might be strategic, as it is often argued within the genocide-denying discourse that the Republic of Turkey cannot be blamed for events in the Ottoman era (Avedian, 2012). Furthermore, the area imagined as Armenia from 104 years ago on the “before” map conflates the era of the Kingdom of Cilicia (1198–1375) with the era of the six Armenian Vilayets in the Ottoman Empire centuries later. Based on present needs of genocide recognition, historical fact is remixed to create what, for the intended audience, reads as an accurate framing of the past. The comments on the map post accept the geopolitical and historical representation and the narrative—someone has commented simply by saying, “facts,” while others have commented with strings of multiple crying or angry emoji. According to McCulloch (2019: 365–366), repetitive emoji strings function as beat gestures (nodding vigorously, shaking a fist) and indicate great emphasis of emotion or affinity.

Suffering is also narrated through more explicit images of human struggle. A post from 2019 features a genocide remembrance day poster that is a collage of historical, black and white photographs that include images of people being hanged, piles of dead bodies, women holding infants amid corpses, a detail of praying hands and an old woman crying blood. The caption consists of two quotes: “We Never forget, We Never forgive! Our ancestors struggled to live, we will struggle until we receive recognition, justice and reparation!” This post is an example of one that contributes to both the “Suffering” and the “Never Forget” narratives, using the affective power of visuals as a persuasive truth claim that the suffering of the past was simply too great to ever forget.

Finally, the persistence of suffering is narrativized as resulting from genocide denial. A variety of rhetorical techniques is used for this. A post with a quote attributed to the US Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Henry Morgenthau, saying, “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this” is captioned by AiL with “Yet, Turkey denies and still remains unpunished!” Turkey is positioned as the rightful heir of the sins of the Ottoman Empire and thus, as the culprit responsible for making reparations. Turkey’s failure to do so is framed through the vernacular of “history repeating itself.” Failure to recognize the genocide is framed as having led to persistent “Turkish aggression,” which continues to target Armenians, but also harms others. A video posted in 2018 depicts Turkish bodyguards attacking Armenian demonstrators during the United States and Turkey meeting at the White House. A voice behind the camera asks an older bleeding man: “Who attacked you?” He answers, “The Turks, the Turks attacked me!” Posts about Turkey’s invasion of Northern Syria in 2019 draw visual and textual parallels between “Cyprus 1974” and “Syria 2019,” relying on visuality for emotional impact (two images of crying women used). Here too, we see the audiences utilizing the interactivity that Instagram affords to demonstrate that they accept the collective memory narrative of suffering. One user under posts about Syria comments, “history will continue repeating itself until people do something about it. This is the direct outcome of not recognising every genocide turkish government has commited against other nations,” while another quotes philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Never forget

Armenian genocide is an unresolved historical event, which makes its remembrance mission-oriented and, therefore, part of prospective memory narration (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013). The “Never Forget” narrative focuses explicitly on “what still needs to be done” (Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2013: 92).

While responsibility, reparations, and future risks are implied within the “Survival,” and “Suffering” narratives, explicit demands take a center stage in the “Never Forget” narrative. A poignant example of this is a video created by AiL managers and posted in 2020. In it, mainly young people look into the camera and talk about their ancestral Armenian cities and villages in English, Arabic, Armenian, and French. Multilingual expressions may serve a dual purpose of increasing the international scalability of the content, but also acknowledging and valuing the linguistic makeup of the local Lebanese diaspora community. Every person starts with a self-introduction and “I recognize the Armenian genocide and I demand” followed by respective territories, such as for example “my home in Adana,” “my home in Konya,” or “my home in Zeitun.” This video explicitly links a call for genocide recognition to a historical claim to Armenian land. The rhetoric of “I demand my home in . . .” is, similarly to the mentioned metaphor of seeds and revenge, also used by AiL followers. We observed its use in the posts that AiL incorporated into their genocide related Insta Stories.

The video as well as other, photographic posts contributing to the “Never Forget” narrative rely on visuals of youth, often children, creating rhetorical links to both, vitality of the diaspora and the extension of its demands and its remembrance into the future. Posts featuring babies dressed in Armenian flag colors and children holding genocide flowers are captioned with: “I remember/recognize and demand,” attributing mnemonic agency to generations too young to have developed any capacity for it. The rhetorical technique of making children arbiters of memory seems to be shared more among AiL audiences. For example, we observed an image of two small girls holding up a sign “We Remember And Demand. Anita & Amelia #April24 #Justice” incorporated into the AiL genocide related Insta Story. Compared to the distressed, abused children in the “Suffering” narrative, these children are presented as potential agents of change. In the prospective memory narrative—the heroic and burdensome “task” to always remember the genocide is transmitted to the future generations. The “Never Forget” content, especially that featuring children and young people is accepted by the audience with an abundance of .

While the “Survival” and “Suffering” narratives relied on Instagram’s affordances of visuality and interactivity to create a persuasive narrative, the “Never Forget” narrative is accompanied by extensive hashtags, indicating an intent to utilize Instagram’s affordance of scalability. A largely overlapping set of hashtags—#neverforgive #neverforget #neveragain #AG105 #ArmenianGenocide #24April1915 #KeepThePromise and #armenians_in_lebanon—is used in many of the “Never Forget” posts to repeat or emphasize messages in the captions (Zappavigna, 2018). This rhetorically strengthens the call to genocide recognition, while increasing the content’s potential for scalability. #Neverforget #neverforgive were also recurring in the posts included in the genocide related Insta Stories, while no longer active in Stories archived into Highlights, they indicate the AiL audience’s desire to scale these messages on 24 April.

Engaging audiences in memory narration

While the three presented narratives showcase the framing practices at the service of activist memory narration, we will now explore the audience engagement tactics dubbed as branding by Poell et al. (2016). In particular, we focus on the (shifts in) the AiL manager’s practices of creating colloquial, informal, and expressly interactive captions and their curation of Insta Stories.

AiL managers have been posting captions that invite direct interaction from followers since the first visible post on the account in 2015. However, we noticed a shift in the style of the captions, where more direct calls to speak up for genocide recognition were gradually substituted with more social media savvy invitations that took into account specific audience preferences. Based on our ethnographic observation, AiL followers mainly engage with content by liking it, commenting with emoji, and tagging other Instagram users. AiL’s interactive captions too, moved from prescribed statements toward open questions—“Who agrees?!” or “What do you think?”—and invitations to comment with a particular emoji in order to signal agreement or affect (“Comment if you are proud to be Armenian”). These tactics allow for lower effort engagement that is also less explicitly activist and less explicitly oriented toward reparations, but still build affinity (Danesi, 2017) and loops actual and imagined audiences into the narration (Riessman, 2008). Poell et al. (2016: 1001) argue that while both framing and branding are “dynamic processes of signification that facilitate social action,” branding provides a less formal, and more dynamic “frame of action, in which different social actors can develop their own actions, meanings and interpretations”.

Beyond interactive captions and comments, AiL account managers engage actual and imagined audiences into their narratives by incorporating posts or images from other accounts. However, this narration is not collaborative as much as it is curatorial. AiL managers select posts or Story frames that align with their preferred framing and reuse them as AiL posts or as part of their own Insta Stories. Instagram’s functionality in terms of collaborative narration is rather different in posts and Stories, where posts cannot be easily shared from one account to another and it is impossible to attribute authorship to a repurposed post in any other way but tagging, but sharing other Instagram users’ public posts or Story frames into one’s own Story is easy, and the authorship is automatically retained. Shaped by these affordances, AiL Insta Story narratives contribute toward activist memory narration, but serve additional functions of engaging audiences and, perhaps more significantly, performing having engaged audiences. In the two genocide-related Insta Stories we analyzed, majority of the frames were from the Insta Stories of accounts that follow and/or are followed by AiL. They aligned with one or more of the three AiL memory activist narratives rhetorically and had tagged the AiL account. Comprising the Story narrative primarily of posts tagged with the AiL username allows the AiL managers to communicate that AiL narratives and calls to action resonate widely. Furthermore, as argued earlier, AiL followers often share AiL posts to their own Stories, and sometimes manually repost AiL posts to their Instagram accounts on 24 April. AiL account managers, in turn, reuse those in their own 24 April commemoration Insta Stories, thus creating a layered narrative of audience engagement.

Challenging narration

While the audiences engaging with the content through majority of the comments, tagging, and reposting accepted the three activist memory narratives, there were limited occasions of it being rejected or challenged (Budryte, 2010). In 2019, a post was made toward the “Survival” narrative, where survival is equated to inter-Armenian marriage. The post features text “Keep calm & love an Armenian & don’t marry a foreigner” on a flag colored background with a caption: “What do you think?” This is the only post on the account that we interpret as strongly disputed by the preferred audience of Armenians or those sympathetic to the Armenian diaspora, and one of the more extensively commented on. While some comments affirm the message, “Simple, cause in 1915 we had a genocide of 1.5 million. . . we are bound by duty to keep our identity alive,” the idea of ethnic purity is largely rejected via comments on the nature of love, the alternative ways of keeping the Armenian culture alive and on diasporic audience members’ love for their non-Armenian partners.

The most common form of challenging the AiL activist memory narratives, however, are emoji-string comments compiling , , and , or alternatively, and interspersed with and/or . We interpret both as challenging the genocide recognitionist and reparation oriented activist memory narration, albeit with varying levels of aggression. While the first, we interpret broadly as a “F*** you Armenia(ns)” sentiment, the second laughs at the AiL framing of the past (e.g. the previously mentioned before and after map) and professes love for Turkey or Azerbaijan. The latter becomes significant through ethnographic observation, as we noticed retroactive negative commenting at times of new political clashes (e.g. at the border of Armenia and Azerbaijan in July 2020 but also more recently during the Nagorno-Karabakh war in autumn 2020). Thus, posts made in 2015 or 2019 suddenly received “I Azerbaijan and Turkey” emoji comments in 2020.

The narrative-rejecting emoji comments are not specific to any of the three narratives and appear to be posted by users identifying as Turkish or Azeri. Turkey and Azerbaijan have strong cultural, economic and military ties, so some users identifying with one of the countries seem to use both flags in their emoji comments. In the interview, Mr A acknowledges the presence of Turkish and Turkey favoring social media users among the AiL audience: “Turks use the social media platform to show all around the world that there is no genocide,” he says, adding that AiL managers only remove Turkish people’s comment when they use obscenities. Ostensibly, the non-censoring of the emoji comments can be interpreted as serving the purpose of backing up the AiL “Suffering” narrative of Turkish refusal of recognizing the genocide and the framing of Turkey as the perpetrator both in the past and the present.

Concluding discussion

We argue that AiL account managers are agents of remembrance (Winter, 2006) utilizing social media branding practices (Poell et al., 2016) and Instagram’s set of affordances to put forth three multimodally constructed memory narratives—“Survival,” “Suffering,” and “Never Forget.” Together, these three narratives strategically commemorate the contested past of the Armenian genocide with the intent of influencing public debate and political discourse (Gutman, 2017). As such, memory narration on AiL carries memory activist impetus. The narration includes specific truth claims and uses visual and textual rhetoric to frame the past in a way that serve the diaspora Armenian’s present and future needs around the importance of genocide recognition and reparations (Proitz, 2018; Riessman, 2008; Wertsch and Roediger, 2008). In the retrospective memory narratives of “Survival” and “Suffering” Armenians are positioned as thriving—because of the heroism activated within the people by the tragic events of 1915, and as still suffering due to the denial of the 1915 events. The prospective memory narrative of “Never Forget” reframes the suffering and survival as both cause and evidence justifying further action (including anti-Turkish sentiment and demands for reparations) en route to genocide recognition. The “Never Forget” narrative also rhetorically places mnemonic agency and responsibility on children and indicates that the demand for recognition and reparations will not disappear with the generation who remembers the genocide firsthand.

Narration is always co-constructed with an audience through the narrators’ imaginary of it, but then received and interpreted in various ways by particular actual audiences (Riessman, 2008). In the case of AiL, the rhetorical framing in most content seems to imagine an audience belonging or sympathetic to the Armenian diaspora experience. The actual engaged audiences (those commenting, reposting, and liking) seem to primarily comprise the sympathetic group, but also include a minority of those who reject that meta-narrative. Thus, the activist memory narrative on AiL can be argued to serve at least a double purpose of offering a counter-narrative to some audiences, while legitimizing and commemorating the meta-narrative of the genocide for others (Budryte, 2010). While our data do not allow us to assess who has seen AiL content (not all followers see all content, and non-followers may find it through hashtags or Discover tab recommendations), nor do we have access to audience members’ attitudes regarding the Armenian genocide, we can tentatively add agitating and enlightening (Perloff, 2017) any other possible audiences about the Armenian genocide as the third purpose of the AiL narrative.

While both the sympathetic and challenging engaged audiences insert themselves into the narration via comments, the memory narration in Insta Stories involves audience narratives more thoroughly. AiL account managers repurpose genocide-related posts from AiL audiences, including posts that AiL audiences have previously repurposed from AiL. This curates narratives of “Survival,” and “Never Forget” (the narrative of “Suffering” gets limited airtime in the studied Insta Stories), while simultaneously showcasing the resonance of AiL narrative among their audience. While we interpret the first as a practice of framing, the second is in line of social media branding (Poell et al., 2016). All together, the retrospective and prospective narration in “Suffering,” “Survival,” and “Never Forget,” the retroactive commenting by those challenging the narratives, and the partial loss of networked functionality (hashtags become inactive, the potential for scalability is lost), when Insta Stories are archived into Highlights leads to a “complex temporal overlay” (Rigney, 2018: 372), where memory is narrated in “a time-travelling dialogue between multiple sources” and re-invents “history as a useful mythological resource for defending identity, building inter-group solidarity and maintaining social cohesion” (Jovchelovitch, 2012: 440).

Arguably, on social media, memory narratives like the one we have analyzed on AiL coexist with content that feeds into what Hoskins (2018) calls the memory of the multitude. Future research would benefit from analyzing the commercially and algorithmically “narrated” memory of the Armenian genocide on Instagram by researching the truth claims, rhetoric, and reactions to posts assembled under hashtags like #armeniangenocide, but also the more multi-purpose ones like #neverforget.