Structures of activism, contents of change. Linking online social and semantic networks in the fight against violence on women

This paper seeks to advance our understanding of the role of social media networks within collective efforts. By setting its focus on the transnational campaign Take Back The Tech!, aimed at reclaiming digital technologies for gender empowerment and against violence on women, it explores possible network-based mechanisms to link social structures of online communication established on Twitter with the production of contents produced by activists. Thus, the paper adopts a longitudinal approach, as it examines and compares social and semantic networks that deployed around this campaign in the period 2012-2015. Attempts to combine social and semantic aspects of online activism pass through a combined use of network analysis and other techniques, in particular lexicon content analysis of tweet texts and URLs possibly included within them.