Networks and Narratives on Twitter about the #8M International Women's Day (2018) in Spain: Feminist Social Movement and counter-movement expressions

Abstract

[EN] On March 8, 2018, International Women's Day took place worldwide, which brought relevant mobilisations and support in Spain. The feminist movement proved strong and demonstrated great vitality in a historic and unprecedented mobilisation. That day, many people took to the streets worldwide, and massively in Spain, to demand equal rights and opportunities for women and men. This mobilisation also took place on social networks. This paper aims to analyse the networks and narratives on Twitter around March 8 virtual mobilisation in Spain in 2018. This work analyses 557,548 tweets containing the hashtags representative of the mobilisation and collected through the API rest and API streaming Twitter platforms. The results suggest the presence of a strong national and international network of support for the feminist movement and a counter-feminist network that does not support the mobilisation and also propagates hate speech towards women and the feminist movement itself on the Twitter network.