People power: a content analysis of #VAWG tweets in India

Twitter has been a valuable space for increasing public awareness and participation in discourses on sexual violence, including Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG). One common thread running through most Twitter-based VAWG studies earlier was the time frame - the data analysed was for a short term, often less than a year. These studies also found the counterpublics interest in VAWG news was fleeting. This article employed content analysis to study what tweeters tweet and for how long on VAWG on Twitter. The authors manually mined 2810 tweets relating to four near-identical rapes from four parts of India for the period 2008 to 2018. Initial findings show that despite the prevalence of a hashtag culture where tweets go viral and disappear fast, the counterpublics interest in sexual violence and rape cases in India has been sustained and has grown stronger over a long period. Also, not all behaviour patterns are the same over different periods. Social media, specifically Twitter, is an essential platform for discussion on gender violence and specifically Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG). The discussions on Twitter show an increasing but fleeting interest in VAWG amongst counterpublics. This study uses content analysis of the tweets to understand for how long the tweeters involved themselves with VAWG-related cases and discussions on Twitter. From 2008 to 2018, the authors thoroughly mined 2810 tweets on four nearly identical rapes that occurred in four different regions of India. The results demonstrate that the public's interest in sexual assault and rape cases in India has persisted and strengthened over time, even in the face of a hashtag culture where tweets quickly become viral or go unnoticed. Furthermore, not all behavioural patterns remain consistent over time.