Culture and social mobilisation against sexual violence via Twitter: the case of the “#LaManada” court ruling in Spain

Abstract

Introduction. This article analyses the dissemination of tweets critical of one of the most controversial and widely publicised court rulings in Spanish history, which found a group of men guilty of abuse rather than the more serious crime of rape in 2018. Methodology. The study used a mixed method of quantitative and qualitative approaches, with a corpus for analysis of 73,904 tweets. Results. Of the total number of tweets obtained, 49,886 (67.5%) were retweets, while the other 32.5% were original messages with or without mentions of other users and replies to other tweets. Conclusions. The conclusions drawn are that Twitter has come to be recognised as the social network for expressing political outrage, and that the social protests on the network are associated with processes of militancy and feminist movement. Anonymity on these platforms tends to be viewed as an opportunity to freely express ideas and opinions that would otherwise be impossible to disseminate.