LAUSR

Abstract In this article I explore Twitter as a place where public protest occurs, rather than being just a means for circulation (e.g., dissemination of information about or organization of a public protest). There has been much debate regarding what social media and publics can do; in order to explore Twitter as a place of public protest, I show that social media can do the work of publics. I examine the recent New York Police Department’s Twitter public relations campaign that went awry and, as such, was subversively taken over by the public, thus moving a protest against police brutality from a physical location to an online location. To illustrate this functionality of Twitter I conduct an analysis of the protesters’ tweets through a composite lens consisting of Michael Warner’s 7 features of a public and James Paul Gee and Elisabeth Hayes’ 15 features of an affinity space.