The framing(s) of empathy in social media and the arts

magazine, made a post on Twitter depicting a logo made up of the words "Je suis Charlie" in black and white.The slogan was taken up massively on worldwide social media in the following days, as an expression of solidarity with the victims of the attack, through this claim of identification.Other internet-users responded with the slogan "Je ne suis pas Charlie" as a way of condemning the attacks, while also expressing their lack of support for the editorial line of the satirical paper, or in order to refuse the political and media framing of the attack as an assault on freedom of expression and the Republic as a whole, to which the only appropriate response would be an upsurge of national unity (Truc, 2020).Certain members of the public refused to participate in the organized minutes of silence that were held after the Charlie Hebdo attack, or other attacks in Europe, citing the absence of such homages for the victims of violence elsewhere, be they in Rwanda, Syria, or in Sudan (Truc, 2016).Indeed, in the wake of the attack on a mosque in New Zealand on 15 March 2019, in which fifty-one people were murdered, commentators drew attention to the lack of any similar gestures to those which followed the Charlie Hebdo attack, and to the significantly-smaller uptake of the slogan "Je suis Christchurch."In the case of terrorist attacks, but also of wars, natural disasters, or other humanitarian crises, members of the public who have no direct knowledge of the events, being neither victims nor witnesses, are only able to create their own internal representations of what has happened through the individual testimonies of those who did experience these events, or, more commonly, through consumption of the political and media narratives and framings that are presented to them (Truc, 2020).