Abstract

Social media platforms have opened new doors for feminist movements to publicly address social issues, such as harassment, sexual assault, rape, femicides, and other forms of gender violence. At the same time, news media actors have adopted and adapted the use of social platforms when covering public affairs in general. In this digital journalism research project, I explore how Mexican news media outlets covered issues related to gender violence and femicides during International Women’s Day 2022 on Twitter by analyzing content associated with specific hashtags.
To answer this question, I first pursued a thematic analysis of tweets from mainstream news media that used the hashtags #8M, #8Marzo2022, and #DíaInternacionalDeLaMujer, to understand the coverage's content and main narratives more closely. Secondly, I reflected on the findings of this thematic analysis through the lens of Hanitzsch and Vos’ 2018 work on the 18 roles of journalism in political life. In this sense, this study also aims to expand on Hanitzsch and Vos theoretical framework to offer a reviewed approach that is more flexible and applicable to analyzing news coverage on social media in the face of current social movements.