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.
BennettWLSegerbergA (2012) The logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. Information, Communication & Society15(5): 739–768.
BlevinsJL (2019) Social media and social justice movements after the diminution of black-owned media in the United States. In: BanjoOO (ed.) Media across the African Diaspora: Content, Audiences, and Global Influence. New York: Routledge, pp. 191–203.
4.
BonillaYRosaJ (2015) #Ferguson: digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist42(1): 4–17.
5.
BrunsA (2005) Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. New York: Peter Lang.
6.
BrunsA (2008) Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.
7.
CubbageJ (2014) African Americans and social media. In: LangmiaKTyreeTCMO’BrienPet al. (eds) Social Media: Pedagogy and Practice. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, pp. 103–127.
8.
DeLucaKMLawsonSSunY (2012) Occupy Wall Street on the public screens of social media: the many framings of the birth of a protest movement. Communication, Culture & Critique5(4): 483–509.
9.
EntmanRM (1993) Framing: toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication43(4): 51–58.
10.
EntmanRMRojeckikA (2000) The Black Image in the White Mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
11.
EverbachTClarkMNisbettGS (2018) #IfTheyGunnedMeDown: an analysis of mainstream and social media in the Ferguson, Missouri, shooting of Michael Brown. Electronic News12: 23–41.
12.
FewsA (2017) The assassination of character: a reversed agenda setting study of the Twitter campaign “#IfTheyGunnedMeDown.”Journal of Promotional Communications5(3): 260–279.
13.
FreelonDMcIlwainCDClarkMD (2016). Beyond the hashtags: #Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, and the online struggle for offline justice. Center for Media and Social Impact, School of Communication, American University, Washington, DC, February. Available at: http://cmsimpact.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/beyond_the_hashtags_2016.pdf
14.
GallagherRJReaganAJDanforthCMet al. (2018) Divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter. PLoS ONE13(4): e0195644.
GrossN (2017) #IfTheyGunnedMeDown: the double consciousness of black youth in response to oppressive media. Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society19(4): 416–437.
19.
HarlowS (2012) Social media and social movements: Facebook and an online Guatemalan justice movement that moved offline. New Media & Society14(2): 225–243.
20.
HermidaALewisSCZamithR (2014) Sourcing the Arab Spring: a case study of Andy Carvin’s sources on Twitter during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication19(3): 479–499.
21.
HonL (2016) Social media framing within the Million Hoodies movement for justice. Public Relations Review42: 9–19.
22.
HowardPNDuffyAFreelonDet al. (2011) Opening closed regimes: what was the role of social media during the Arab Spring?Social Science Research Network (SSRN). Available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2595096
23.
HoytKD (2016) The affect of the hashtag: #HandsUpDontShoot and the body in peril. Explorations in Media Ecology15(1): 33–54.
24.
JacksonSJWellesBF (2015) Hijacking #myNYPD: social media dissent and networked counterpublics. Journal of Communication65(6): 932–952.
25.
JacksonSJWellesBF (2016) #Ferguson is everywhere: initiators in emerging counterpublic networks. Information, Communication & Society19(3): 397–418.
26.
LangfordCLSpeightM (2015) #BlackLivesMatter: epistemic positioning, challenges, and possibilities. Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric5(3–4): 78–89.
The New York Times Editorial Board (2018) The new radicalization of the Internet. The New York Times, 25November, p. SR10.
31.
OlteanuAWeberIGatica-PerezD (2015) Characterizing the demographics behind the #BlackLivesMatter movement. arXiv:1512.05671. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.05671
32.
PapacharissiZ (2016) Affective publics and structures of storytelling: sentiment, events and mediality. Information, Communication & Society19: 307–324.
33.
RobinsonS (2011) “Journalism as process”: the organizational implications of participatory online news. Journalism & Communication Monographs13(3): 137–210.
34.
SchiappaJ (2014) #IfTheyGunnedMeDown: the necessity of “Black Twitter” and hashtags in the age of Ferguson. ProudFlesh: New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics and Consciousness9: 1–33.
35.
Van DijckJ (2011) Tracing Twitter: the rise of a microblogging platform. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics7(3): 333–348.
36.
WangRLiuWGaoS (2016) Hashtags and information virality in networked social movement. Online Information Review40(7): 850–866.