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About Annual Meeting
Trolling Social Movements: Movement/Countermovement Dynamics in Online Social Movement Campaigns
Sun, August 12, 2:30 to 3:30pm, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Floor: Level 5, Salon GAbstract
Little work has been done on online trolling, and far less has been done on trolls’ relationship to online social movement campaigns. This study uses literature on movement strategy and movement/countermovement dynamics to explore online social movements. Specifically, this study examines how the #shoutyourabortion (SYA) campaign grew and maintained popularity and explores the interactions of both the SYA campaign and a counter campaign, #shoutyourabortion-regret (SYA-R). Trolls are creating a new movement dynamic that is absent from social movement literature. The impact of trolls on both campaigns is accounted for in this study, expanding the literature on movement strategies and movement/countermovement dynamics.
Countermovements were created quickly after the start of SYA, but none approached the same level of popularity. I focus on SYA-R because, while it is not the most popular countermovement, it is the one whose intended goal is most directly counter to SYA: SYA is intended to destigmatize abortion through storytelling, and SYA-R uses storytelling to show that abortion is harmful.
This study is conducted through a content analysis of 6,123 posts to Facebook and Twitter through the SYA and SYA-R online social movement campaigns. Facebook posts extended from September 2015 to April 2016, and were collected from the campaign accounts. Tweets from October 2015 to April 2016 were collected from the SYA search results, which also included any SYA-R-regret tweets. Posts were coded for the following information: post type (initial/response); supporter/troll; campaign; and a variety of frames (e.g. storytelling, the political environment, and religiosity). Codes with a frequency of 20% or higher were included in the analyses.