Abstract
Hashtag “#NoDAPL” was used by environmental activists for a series of protests against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline beginning in early 2016. Utilizing 2 million tweets with the main hashtag, as well as the auxiliary hashtags, from around 550,000 unique users between November 2016 and February 2017, the study investigated the interactions among four groups—regular activists, Native American activists, reporters, and organizations identified based on their bio information, and the effects of physical location on network attention. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) on the retweet network showed that Native American activists occupied the most prominent positions and that different groups assumed different network roles. Location analysis based on Poisson regression showed that physical proximity’s effects on attention depended on group status, and the effects were moderated by users’ authority. Implications of the study results on networked publics and the influence of locality and proximity on socially mediated networks were discussed.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
