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Tweeting #Palestine: Twitter and the mediation of Palestine

International Journal of Cultural Studies

Published online on

Abstract

This article is concerned with the relationship between social media and Palestinian politics, focusing specifically on #Palestine. The theoretical background is that of mediation, which understands the relationship as a dialectical one, in which producers/users and contents are part of an ongoing cycle, feeding into, and consequently changing each other. In empirical terms, this article collected and analysed 7557 tweets with the hashtag Palestine. The findings and analysis suggest that the mediation of #Palestine involves the co-construction of a subjective, positioned and emotionally charged #Palestine by a multitude of users, but who are quite similar in their ideological positioning vis-a-vis Palestine. Further, this mediation involves a redistribution of power over the representation of #Palestine from mainstream media that focus on ‘hard’ news to activist, positioned, experience-based and affective news and other content on Palestine.