More Than Words: Modeling the Collective Construction of Injustice, Agency, and Identity Through Twitter Socio-Semantic Networks in the Fight Over Gender and Environmental Issues

This paper aims to contribute to current reflections on the nexus between social media and social movements by investigating how online networks spurring from the use of digital communication platforms serve as conduits for the formation of collective action frames. Starting from tweets sent during two recent protest episodes – the 2017 International Women’s Day and People’s Climate March – we model online conversations as socio-semantic networks comprising activists and the contents they generate, as well links within and between these two sets of nodes. Grounding thoroughly within social movement studies, and using state-of-the-art Natural language processing and network analysis approaches, we perform a twofold analysis. On the one hand, we explore how communities of activists online contribute to the creation of the three components of “collective action frames” (Gamson 1992): injustice, which motivates collective endeavors; agency, the consciousness that is possible to alter the situation; and identity, which supports the identification of oppositional targets. On the other hand, we characterize the interplay between activists’ communities and frame components along the dynamic unfolding of protest dynamics (prelude, peak, dissolution). Our results point to a shifting use of Twitter affordances over the two protest cycles which, in turn, conveys different degrees of prominence to injustice, agency, and identity components.