Computational Communication Research

Recent developments in both mobile technology and social media have produced significant shifts in both the volume and nature of current events images available to the public. Whereas images of current events used to be the sole domain of professional photojournalists, now nearly anyone with a mobile phone can witness and photograph an event, and distribute that photograph to the public at large. This paper explores roughly 9.5 million tweets and nearly 807,000 images about the August 2017 Unite the Right protest in Charlottesville, VA. We assign “frames” to images, and consider variation in framing across news organizations and individuals. We find individuals' accounts engage in more diverse framing than news organizations, and that there is no convergence of framing over time between individuals and the media. These results have important implications for the diversity of perspectives represented in online discourse, and raise questions about the roles – both positive and negative – of “citizen photojournalists.”