Social Media Memory of January 6: Content Analysis of Twitter One Year Later

ABSTRACT We report on the results of a content analysis of a random sample of tweets ( n = 16, 480) about the January 6th insurrection published one year after the attacks. Drawing from research on social media memory, far‐right activism, and social memories in times of crises, we performed a deductive manual coding of the tweets. We found that roughly four of every ten Twitter users remembered the U.S. Capitol attack as an insurrection. Importantly, though, the insurrection frame was adopted by users who were in favor and against the attack. The other most frequent frames were censorship, used by people who aimed to discredit the idea that there had been an insurrection; treason, used by people across the political spectrum to claim that “the other side” had betrayed the United States; fear of other, employed by users who blamed “the others” for the insurrection and its aftermath; and accountability, used by people against the insurrection to call for the attackers to face justice and its leaders to be barred from holding public office. We also noticed that the different frames were not exclusive. Those who used the term “insurrection” frequently used others such as accountability, censorship, treason, terrorism, and conspiracy.