A Temporal Comparison of Environmental Twitter Networks Over the Transition Between the Most Recent US Political Administrations

The social movements literature has long observed a behavior described by the convergence and the building of coalitions of different movements under periods of hardship or struggle. While many have studied this among activists, fewer have looked at the role of more established social movement organizations on twitter. In this presentation, we examine the evolution of two samples of environmental Twitter networks over the transition from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration. One sample was gathered from the Policy Elite dataset used in previous research, and the second consists of organizations that cosponsored the 2018 People’s Climate March. These initial samples are based in both cases from off-line lists, we then gathered tweets of all accounts that were mentioned or retweeted by the members of the initial sample to get a user-defined network boundary. While the nature of their activities and audiences differ (activism vs. policy), the organisations which comprise two networks share a common interest in environmental preservation and the spread of climate related information. Given the shift in political paradigm, social movement theorists would suggest that each movement, as a self-sustaining platform, would engage defense mechanisms in order to stay sustainable. Our analysis will use temporal measures of community detection (specifically multiplex community affiliation clustering), reciprocity, brokerage and closure get insights as to how the online networks react and engage both within and between samples over time.