News or social mobilization? An exploratory study about the role of Twitter in the Spanish indignados protests

This article intends to contribute to the debate on whether Twitter can be a complementary tool or an alternative to traditional media. Based on a qualitative and quantitative exploratory approach, the research focuses on the coverage of social issues to explore the informative capacities of Twitter. The sample consists of more than 1000 tweets covering the marches that occurred in Spain in July 2012 against the government’s public policies. The results show that less than 25 per cent of tweets could be considered as strictly informative. Due to its lack of informative focus, high degree of emotion, repetitive contents and personal writing marks, the power of Twitter seems to be rather an opinion and emotion net organizer than a reporting tool: we cannot consider it an informative source in the cases explored.