From #KämpaShowan to #KämpaMalmö and Beyond

On 8th March 2014 four leftist activists were seriously wounded during a confrontation with members of the far-right following a demonstration in Malmö, Sweden. Confrontations between the left and right are not uncommon in Sweden but this occasion the wider public’s reaction was. A week later 13,000 people joined a demonstration in solidarity for the wounded and in particular, the activist still fighting for his life. It was partly a result of social media activity that the demonstration involved people far beyond the groups that had organized it. Those who first reported the confrontation on Twitter attempted to maintain the anonymity of the wounded. However, their adoption of ‘Kämpa S’ as a slogan in combination with Twitter’s architecture allowed the identification of the most seriously wounded activist Showan Shattak and lead to the coining and rapid popular uptake of the #KämpaShowan hashtag. Thereafter #KämpaShowan spawned other hashtags including #KämpaMalmö and #KämpaSverige. This paper analyses how these hashtag dynamics reflect the scaling-up of particular social concerns and the different stakes that various groups had in framing the confrontation in order to mobilize wider publics. It relies on the visual analysis and mapping of the imagery from a single solidarity Facebook page and aims to highlight #KämpaShowan’s networks of solidarity and stretched spatial trajectories. In turn, it explores how different groups attempted to take advantage of and steer #KämpaShowan in order to influence public understandings of the confrontation and shape responses to it. It also considers how different groups struggled to maintain, and occasionally lost, control over the hashtag once it had achieved greater spatial distribution and a broader range of participants, indicating how social media can be a powerful tool for garnering support for local mobilizations across scales and yet cannot always be easily directed towards chosen and changing political agendas.