Description
This paper uses cutting edge information analytics to manipulate large scale twitter data sets this paper offers both important methodological and empirical insights in the means by which terrorism and counter terrorism exist and are contested in the everyday on social media. Employing a comparative perspective, this paper contrasts two important security debates from 2017 that would shape British security debates for years to come. The Grenfell tower fire rocked British politics and question decades of social policy and the safety and security of working-class social housing tenants. The Manchester arena bombing by a British jihadist would bring the question of security, Islam and integration to the fore in British politics. Both debates would situate British Muslims as central to both debates – whether as social housing tenants in multicultural London or as potential jihadists from a “suspect” community (Cherney and Murphy 2016). However, whether in the frustrated public enquiry into the failings of Grenfell or in the media and political coverage of the bombing, Muslims agency to shape the debates remained limited through either official channels of governance, or through the mainstream media. This paper examines the use of social media by Muslims to (re)construct terrorism and security in the everyday space of social media.
