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Online Communication and Protest Camps

Ricarda Sowa, Elena Staudinger, Cecilia Hussinger und Andrea Lora

Telegram has become a central part of social movement organizing over the last decade. Particularly the possibility of creating channels with a broadcasting function open to virtually everyone and anyone, allow on the one hand to attract and mobilize people interested in participating in these movements before and during protests, as well as to provide real-time updates of the most important events. In this case, the objective is to investigate how and for what purpose Telegram channels were used during the formation and maintenance of student protest camps in solidarity with Palestine earlier in 2024. In other words, we are asking: What does the discourse in Telegram channels focus on? Using Python and R we take a comparative perspective on analysing qualitative and quantitative data scraped from corresponding to six Telegram channels. Four USA-channels and two Spanish channels. We use an Automated Dictionary Approach to group relevant words to the categories of 'police discourse', 'camp community', 'jurisdiction', 'violence', 'organization' and 'mobilisation', in order to calculate shares per message. Quantitatively, we want to identify which discourse is more prevalent in the chosen channels. The qualitative results serve as an exemplification of how these discourses were framed and to whom the channels and messages were targeted.