Violent Images: Understanding Ukraine's Euromaidan Conflicts through Twitter's Visual Media

This paper analyzes the visual content contained in Twitter posts associated with violent clashes between the “Euromaidan” protestors and Ukrainian government forces on February 18, 2014 in and around Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square).  Using a dataset obtained from Twitter that is comprised of all posts containing visual media tagged with the Euromaidan hashtag (Ukrainian: #Євромайдан; Russian: #Eвромайдан; English: #Euromaidan), this paper examines how real-time information about unfolding events is created and shared not only by audiences directly involved with the protests, but also throughout Ukraine and worldwide.  Given Twitter's strict 140 character limit for individual posts, users often turn to images to expand on their comments or to make a particular point or argument, as well as to provide documentary evidence of events, making these images an especially rich source for understanding the processes and practices of protest movements.  However, because the analysis of images difficult to automate, they are often omitted from discussions of Twitter’s role in these social movements.  For this reason, this paper uses a mixed method approach that combines quantitative analytics with qualitative approaches such as content and semiotic analysis and focuses its attention explicitly on the production and consumption of visual images as a way to understand how social media is employed during periods of social and political conflict.