Tweeting for peace? Twitter and the Ardoyne parade dispute in Belfast, July 2014

Paul Reilly

doi:10.5210/fm.v21i11.6996

Abstract

This paper explores how social media can facilitate peace building by focusing on how citizens used Twitter during a contentious march in the Ardoyne district of North Belfast in July 2014. Fears of a repeat of sectarian clashes seen a year earlier were not realized, and the study was designed to empirically investigate whether critics and supporters of the Orange Order used the microblogging site to help reduce the sectarian tensions that surrounded the contentious parade. In particular, it focused on how users responded to rumors and disinformation spread on the micro-blogging site, which had the potential to incite violence in the contested interface area. The nature of the debate amongst those ‘tweeters’ who commented on the contentious Ardoyne parade was also investigated, with a focus on how they framed the attitudes and behavior of the ‘other’ community during these events. Results indicate that the majority of tweeters praised both sides for keeping the parade and related protests peaceful. However, Twitter did not appear to be a shared space capable of fostering cross-community consensus on how to resolve the parade dispute. The study suggests that Twitter’s most significant contribution to peace building in Northern Ireland might lie in its empowerment of citizens to correct rumors and disinformation, which have the potential to exacerbate sectarian tensions and generate intercommunal violence.

Highlights

This paper will explore how social media might facilitate peace building by focusing on how citizens used Twitter during a contentious Orange Order march in the Ardoyne district of North Belfast in July 2014
Northern Ireland Secretary of State Teresa Villiers praised the Orange Order, as well as nationalist and unionist political representatives, for helping deliver the most peaceful Twelfth in recent years [2]. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to fully explore these events, the ways in which critics and supporters of the Orange Order used social media to express their views about the contentious parade merit analysis
This ‘competition of victimhoods’ between Unionists and Nationalists has arguably been perpetuated by a consociationalist framework, based on mandatory powersharing between political elites drawn from the two main ethnic blocs, which has appeared to prioritize group rights over those held by individuals who wish to move beyond such ethnosectarianism (Aughey, 2005)

Summary

Introduction

This paper will explore how social media might facilitate peace building by focusing on how citizens used Twitter during a contentious Orange Order march in the Ardoyne district of North Belfast in July 2014. Only around seven percent of children are currently educated in integrated schools (Hansson, et al, 2013) and research conducted over the past decade has shown that young people, those who live in the vicinity of interface areas, believe that there are no safe places in which they can interact with members of the other community (Lewis, et al, 2008) This lack of shared space was recognized in the Good Relations Strategy launched in May 2013, which aimed to provide more spaces and opportunities for intergroup contact through measures such as increased provision of shared educational facilities (OFMDFM, 2013).

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