Building Protest Movements on Twitter: Geographical Anatomy of the Open Source Campaigns #not1more and #blacklivesmatter

• In Event: 336 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. Citizenship and Protest in the 21st Century: #Blacklivesmatter and Other Recent Movements in Context

Abstract

This article studies how two social movement networks evolve in time and place by means of Twitter. Activists campaigning against the deportation of undocumented migrants in the United States introduced the #not1more hashtag in early 2013, which is analyzed as an example of “open source activism”, and compared to the #blacklivesmatter movement. The campaign has a distinct topology: there are persistent and well-connected core users and many ephemeral users. The campaign also has a distinct geography: it has four interconnected metropolitan hubs and a large periphery in cities where activism flares up episodically. This topology and geography is explained by analyzing how network communities are constituted. While the exact topology and geography of #not1more and #blacklivesmatter is distinctive, we expect qualitatively similar patterns in other cases of open source activism.

Authors

• Sander van Haperen, University of Amsterdam

• Justus L. Uitermark, Erasmus University Rotterdam