From Facebook to front page: the influence of the Gilets Jaunes’ social media on local press language and framing

This article examines how social media discussions within a protest movement intersect with local news coverage, focusing on the French Gilets Jaunes in the Var department. We hypothesize that journalistic language may progressively align with activists’ semantic universe, thereby contributing to the diffusion of movement claims and terminology. We analyze activists’ Facebook discussions and reporting by the regional daily Var-Matin between 2018 and 2021. Study 1 combines qualitative analysis of reciprocal mentions between Facebook groups and press articles to document mechanisms of interdependence. It shows that local journalists routinely relied on Facebook as a source of information about the movement’s activities and claims, using activists’ online discussions both to anticipate protest events and to contextualize them. Study 2 applies word embeddings to measure semantic proximity between activist and journalistic discourse over time. Results reveal a selective and time-structured semantic convergence consistent with journalists’ sustained exposure to activists’ internal communication. Although Facebook discussions gradually shifted away from some initial claims, local press coverage repeatedly mobilized these founding frames whenever the movement re-entered the news agenda. At the local level, these findings refine the protest paradigm by showing that coverage emphasized protesters’ motivations.