Social media framing and public interpretation of police-demonstrator interactions in mediatised demonstrations

Contemporary demonstrations increasingly take place within a mediatized environment in which the deliberate filming and sharing of interactions between police officers and demonstrators through social media platforms plays a prominent role. Mediatisation describes the process in which social media becomes increasingly intertwined with demonstrations, not only facilitating communication but also shaping how demonstration events are perceived, interpreted, and experienced by citizens (Couldry & Hepp, 2013). Social media are, for example, used not only to announce demonstrations in advance in order to facilitate mobilisation (Procter et al., 2013; Ralph et al., 2025), but also to make specific events during demonstrations visible. When citizens perceive police-demonstrator interactions as unjust, recording and sharing footage can be used to draw public attention to these encounters and to hold involved actors accountable (Bock, 2016; Wilson & Serisier, 2010). These images can subsequently be disseminated beyond the original demonstration context through digital networks, where different social media users attribute varying interpretations and judgements to the footage, thereby giving individual interactional moments broader public and societal meaning (Storbeck et al., 2025).

Within this mediatised context, uploaders actively shape how events are represented through decisions about which parts of an interaction are shared online, as well as through the contextual framing provided in accompanying captions. These choices contribute to a constructed representation of the event, which may in turn shape how viewers interpret the footage they encounter online. These interpretations are important, as they influence how citizens who were not present at the demonstration evaluate both the event and the actors involved. Understanding how these public reactions are formed is particularly relevant, as differing interpretations of highly circulated demonstration footage may contribute to societal polarization, which in turn can undermine societal resilience (van Stekelenburg, 2023).

In this bachelor thesis project, an online experimental survey will be conducted in which participants are exposed to the same demonstration video accompanied by different caption framings (e.g., neutral, supportive of the demonstration, or critical of the demonstration). The video will be sourced from publicly available social media material. Participants will first complete a short questionnaire measuring relevant background characteristics, such as demographics, trust, previous experience, and familiarity with the demonstration context. After viewing the social media post (caption + video), participants will respond to questions capturing their perceptions and evaluative judgments of the post. Potential examples include perceived legitimacy of the police and demonstrators, credibility of the uploader and/or social media post, or intention to engage with the post. The specific variables included in the study will be selected based on existing literature and the student’s research interests.

Mediatisation, police-demonstrator interactions, social media framing, public interpretation.

Examples of research questions include:

1. To what extent does the framing of a social media post influence viewers’ interpretations of a police-demonstrator interaction?
2. How do viewers’ pre-existing attitudes shape their interpretations of differently framed social media posts depicting a police-demonstrator interaction?
3. To what extent does the framing of a social media post influence viewers’ evaluations of the post and its uploader?

Research questions may be changed based on the student’s interests.

The project involves an online experimental survey in which participants are shown a demonstration-related video depicting a police-demonstrator interaction, accompanied by an experimentally manipulated caption. The survey will primarily collect quantitative data.

Quantitative data will be analysed using R.

Please contact Marleen Haandrikman (m.j.m.haandrikman@utwente.nl) when you are interested in this assignment. The assignment is open to 2 students. The students taking on this assignment can preferably understand sufficient Dutch.  

• Bock, M. A. (2016). Film The Police! Cop-Watching and its embodied narratives. Journal of Communication, 66(1), 13–34. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12204
• Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2013). Conceptualizing mediatization: Contexts, traditions, arguments. Communication Theory, 23(3), 191–202. https://doi-org.ezproxy2.utwente.nl/10.1111/comt.12019
• Procter, R., Crump, J., Karstedt, S., Voss, A., & Cantijoch, M. (2013). Reading the riots: What were the police doing on Twitter? Policing & Society, 23(4), 413-436. https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2013.780223
• Ralph, L., Robinson, P., & Aitken, A. (2025). Policing, social media, and riots: User responses to the police during the 2024 UK summer protests and riots. Policing & Society, 36(3), 273-287. https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2025.2560902
• Storbeck, M., Jacobs, G., Schuilenburg, M., & Van Den Akker, R. (2025). Surveillance experiences of extinction rebellion activists and police: Unpacking the technologization of Dutch protest policing. Big Data & Society, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241307892
• Van Stekelenburg, J. (2023). Het nieuwe demonstreren. In T. Kansil, P. Ponsaers, R. Salet, & P. De Baets (Eds.), Nieuwe spanningen (pp. 13-43). (Cahiers Politiestudies; Vol. 67, No. 2). Gompel & Svacina.
• Wilson, D. J., & Serisier, T. (2010). Video Activism and the ambiguities of counter-surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 8(2), 166–180. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v8i2.3484