Framing to Make an Argument: The Case of the Genocide Hashtag in the Russia-Ukraine war

Abstract

This study tackles hashtags as framing devices which shape public arguments and controversies in computer-mediated communication environments. It focuses on the use of the genocide hashtag on Twitter in the context of the Ukraine-Russia war. It proposes and showcases a methodology to surface how the semantic and discourse properties of the term genocide affect its framing properties as a hashtag which bears argumentative functions, directly or indirectly calling for action.