Digital remembrance: Honouring Srebrenica genocide victims via #ŠtoTeNema

This article aims to track and tackle the StoTeNema hashtag to analyse the meanings generated by Twitter end-users who employed StoTeNema together with other hashtags, texts, visuals, hyperlinks, and metadata. STO TE NEMA (Why are you not here?) first appeared as an alternative commemorative practice (in 2006) to remember the victims of the Srebrenica genocide (1995). In 2012, the StoTeNema hashtag emerged to commemorate human loss on Twitter and provide even more comprehensive access to this space of memory and suffering. Using multimodal discourse analysis, I examine how Aida Sehovic, the artist behind STO TE NEMA, with her team and Twitter’s end-users, portrayed the Srebrenica genocide by employing StoTeNema. I argue that STO TE NEMA has become an influential and recognisable representation of the Srebrenica genocide not only on-site but also online. This research concludes that StoTeNema gained momentum during the global pandemic peak (2020), creating inclusive access to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the genocide locally, regionally, and transnationally.