#Rbnews: A Case of Hashtag Use By Alternative Media in Austerity-Ridden Greece

Since the early 90’s private mainstream media in Greece have strong ties to big business and to the political establishment. The outburst of the economic crisis the majority found them defending vigorously the policies of extreme austerity imposed on Greece by the Troïka (EU, ECB, IMF) and implemented by the two ruling parties. At the same time the crisis lead to severe cut-offs in the plethoric media sector resulting into a wave of lay-offs that put several thousand journalists out of work. The anti-austerity social movement that begun in Greece in 2010 gave birth to an unprecedented number of initiatives of grassroots and citizen journalism that aimed in compensating the failures of mainstream media. Many of the unemployed journalists joined those initiatives producing an original blend of semi-professional, politically engaged and innovative alternative media. One of the main actors of this alternative media scene is Radiobubble, a project including a webradio, a news website, an online community and, more originally, a café in central Athens. Our paper offers an empirical study of Radiobubble and #Rbnews through qualitative and quantitative analysis. We present some formal characteristics of the community (structure, provenance, themes etc.). We then show how the community grew and how, gradually, a set of norms about the use of the hashtag was collectively elaborated. We also examine how a classic phenomenon of forking, similar to those that can be observed in open source communities, was observed when a part of the community started to promote an alternative hashtag (#antireport).