Narratives of Memory on Twitter: The Case of the Día de la Lealtad [Loyalty Day] in Argentina

Abstract

On October 17, 1945, a vast popular mobilization marched over the Plaza de Mayo to demand for the release of Juan Domingo Perón. Since then, that day has been considered the origin of Peronismo [Peronism], one of the most significant political movements in Argentine history. The commemoration of that event, which later came to be called Día de la Lealtad [Loyalty Day] was modified over time by the peronistas [Peronist], and motivated a variety of historical analyses. Our aim is to expand this series by incorporating the narratives of memory that circulate on Twitter. We analyze a corpus of tweets published between 2009 and 2020. The first of these dates is marked by the availability of the archive of this social media through the Twitter Academic API (v2). The second one, a decade later, refers to when, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, some Peronist groups organized the first virtual mobilization to commemorate the Día de la Lealtad [Loyalty Day], even though digitization of the event had a previous history.To study the process by which arguments that elaborate past-present relations on Twitter are constructed and interpreted, we use and evaluate some widely spread tools and techniques for the analysis of the Twittersphere. These include analyzing the changes in the volume of tweets by year; identifying hashtags that articulate narratives for and against the commemoration; tracking relevant users for each conversation; studying the circulation of information with the aid of graph networks and analyzing tweet content through distant reading.