Online Remembrance of the Beirut Port Explosion: Justice, State Failure, and Digital Memory on X and Reddit

Mohamed Soufan

No fv4st_v1, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science

Abstract: Around the five-year mark after the August 4, 2020 Beirut port explosion killed more than 218 people and destroyed large areas of the city, no individual had been convicted in connection with the disaster. This study examines how the explosion is remembered in Lebanon-centered online discourse, asking which memory frames dominate and whether they remain consistent across platforms and languages. The analysis draws on 7,191 records from X (formerly Twitter) and the r/Lebanon subreddit, collected between August 2024 and May 2026 and covering Arabic and English posts and comments. Using LLM-assisted frame classification validated through manual review, the study identifies six memory frames. It finds that unresolved justice and state failure together account for 71.7% of the corpus, while personal grief accounts for 11.8%, a ratio of approximately 6:1. This pattern holds across both platforms and both language groups. The findings suggest that, under conditions of sustained institutional impunity, online memory may function less as retrospective mourning than as a continuing accountability mechanism: distributed, persistent, and politically active. In the Beirut case, digital memory has not settled into commemoration. It remains oriented toward an unresolved demand for reckoning. The study contributes to research on collective memory, disaster remembrance, digital platforms, and accountability in contexts where institutional closure has not been achieved.

Date: 2026-05-31
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:fv4st_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/fv4st_v1

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