Digital Traces of Collective Identities: The Case of the Yellow Vest in the South-East France

Scholars have found recurring elements used by journalists to marginalize and delegitimize protest groups in order to avoid protesters threatening the status quo. These marginalization devices compose the protest paradigm. However, social movement scholars have argued that one of the first consequences of social movement is to expose cultural and change cultural cleavages, influencing the semantic landscape used to address the movement claims, even in the press. A paradoxical standpoint arises from these streams of research: if, on the one hand, it has been shown that the press misreports the movement’s claims, on the other it is argued that movements change the language mainstream journalists employ to report the protest claims. In order to contribute to the studies on the relationship between the framing of the press and social movements, we conducted a parallel study of the press and the Facebook posting activity of a local branch of the Yellow Vest movement in South-East France. We collected data from 6 active Yellow Vest Facebook groups from October 2018 to December 2019 and all the news reporting their activity on the local newspaper, Var Matin. To dig the underlying dimensionality of the text and highlight the content of the discussions in the targeted Facebook groups and the press. The analysis extracted 16 main topics, including general political aspects (Social conflict, Vote, France, Salaries), aspects directly addressing the governmental decisions and policies (Economics and spending, Referendum (RIC), Judicial justice), protest actions (Actions at Toll stations, Street protest, Big-town protest, Law enforcement) and the life of the movement (Greetings, Group and collective life, Identity, Solidarity). Therefore, we calculated the prevalence per week of each topic to explore the change over time of the discussions on Facebook and the press as well as semantic difference per topic, with a particular focus on the aspects directly concerning political actors and policies. The analysis shows that Facebook was not only a platform allowing the Yellow Vests to coordinate the protest actions, it was a place to communicate, exchange information, opinions and experiences creating political participation and claims against the government policy making (e.g., demand for more democracy). These activities shape the movement's identity and accompany offline protest actions. The horizontal structure and overt lack of ideological and political positions of the Yellow Vests forced constant and increasing discussions about the definition of the movement’s boundaries and claims. The analysis also showed a trend of convergence of the semantic references used by both the Yellow Vests and the press. The language adopted by the local press to report the Yellow Vests’ actions and movement life get closer to the one used by the activists on Facebook, showing a possible influence of the latter. This dynamic is graspable only by looking at a large time window.