#refugee: The Formation and Issue Forming Function of Hashtags in Political Debate

As social media like Twitter play an increasingly important role in connecting people to news stories, this paper investigates the formation and issue-framing of Twitter hashtags. Twitter hashtags are searchable metadata labels which categorise the subject or tone of a tweet. Their news functionality lies in their commonality as users bring themselves into a ‘conversation’ by adopting the most salient or ‘trending’ hashtag. This raises questions about how particular hashtags, and their issue framing implications, gain traction among Twitter users and how media, political, civil society or citizen actors variously influence this process. [challenge to traditional media framing with multi actors on the same platform] Taking the 2015 European refugee crisis as a case study, the paper traces the evolution of hashtags associated with the story and assesses the antagonism between the framing of ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’. We examine - Who influences whom in agenda setting? Where do trends begin? (In this case, did the media follow the crowd or did the crowd follow al Jazeera) - How do hashtags form associated ideological clusters: (e.g. #refugee + #refugeewelcome V #refugee + #whitegenocide). -How do hashtags rise and fade out and does the fall off in activity influence news media framing (i.e. do they go back to calling them migrants again, or do the old hashtags remind in use?)