Abstract
In this paper, I engage with the question of how a state military discursively frames protests on social media and how these frames resonate with images and broader national narratives that are part of state's strategic communication. Researching the case of Israel Defense Forces' depiction of the Palestinian series of protests also known as The Great March of Return, I conduct a framing analysis of nearly 1000 tweets collected in the time span of one year.
Despite the rising importance of the relation between protests and social media since 2011, the framing research often remains focused on traditional media, given the perceived hegemony of the newsroom elite. Therefore, I suggest shifting the focus on the military use of social media since they help to promote the official narratives by conveying a vast amount of content relating to war, conflict, and political violence.
Moreover, as we can observe, the content of military social media sites is enormously visual, primarily consisting of photographs and videos. Thus, I do not limit the research paper solely to textual analysis, but I also incorporate visual content analysis consisting of 441 videos and photographs.
Since we can identify a close relationship between narratives, images, and frames I argue that these are not only thoroughly interlinked, but further constitute and pursue black-and-white dichotomous views that serve a dual purpose of demonizing and delegitimizing the "other".