Tweeting for social justice in #Ferguson: Affective discourse in Twitter hashtags

Jeffrey Layne Blevins*, James Jaehoon Lee, Erin E. McCabe, Ezra Edgerton

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

53 Scopus citations

Abstract

Social media platforms have broadened the scope of voices responding to social justice movements, significantly impacting public conversations of important social justice issues. This social network analysis examined hashtags that were invoked on Twitter in the aftermath of the Mike Brown shooting in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson in 2014. From the millions of tweets globally, the use of specific hashtags appeared to focus the conversation on Twitter toward the personal meaning of story events and framed the shooting as something relatable to the posters’ own lives and experiences.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1636-1653
Number of pages18
JournalNew Media and Society
Volume21
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 1 2019

Keywords

  • Ferguson
  • Twitter
  • hashtags
  • social justice

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Communication
  • Sociology and Political Science

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