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Hashtag advocacy on Twitter during the Finnish parliamentary election of 2015

Political Participation
Campaign
Internet
Social Media
Arto Kekkonen
University of Helsinki
Arto Kekkonen
University of Helsinki

Abstract

Interest groups, grassroots movements, non-governmental organizations, political parties and other actors advocating and campaigning for social and political change aim at mobilizing their constituencies on social media to forms of collective and connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Guo & Saxton, 2014; Obar et al., 2012). Supporters and activists are called to participate in actions such as sharing content produced by the organization, creating more content, showing support with a profile picture, and participating in online discussion around issues relevant to the campaign (Penney, 2015; Guo & Saxton, 2014). On Twitter, advocates of social change build campaigns around hashtags to pursue their political goals. Earlier studies of hashtag activism have focused on hashtag use by protest movements and as occurrences of spontaneous online protest (Clark, 2016; Yang, 2016). However, hashtag campaigns are also conducted by established interest organizations as part of their repertoire of lobbying efforts. Presumably, a determinant of the success of such campaigns is the extent to which the organizers are successful at mobilizing citizens to participate. This study takes a comparative look at several campaign hashtags in the context of the Finnish parliamentary election of 2015, adopting and extending the methodology used in previous studies of hashtag publics (Bruns & Stieglitz, 2013; Kekkonen, forthcoming) to look at the roles played by campaign actors and regular users and the overall dynamics of the discussion.