How Diverse Users and Activities Trigger Connective Action via Social Media: Lessons from the Twitter Hashtag Campaign #ILookLikeAnEngineer

Abstract

We present a study that examines how a social media activism campaign aimed at improving gender diversity within engineering gained and maintained momentum in its early period. We examined over 50,000 Tweets posted over the first ~75 days of the #ILookLikeAnEngineer campaign and found that diverse participation -of types of users -increased activity at crucial moments. We categorize these triggers into four types: 1) Event-Driven: Alignment of the campaign with offline events related to the issue (Diversity SFO, Disrupt, etc.); 2) Media-Driven: News coverage of the events in the media (TechCrunch, CNN, BBC, etc.); 3) Industry-Driven: Web participation in the campaign by large organizations (Microsoft, Tesla, GE, Cisco, etc.); and 4) Personality-Driven: Alignment of the events with popular and/or known personalities (e.g. Isis Anchalee; Michelle Sun; Ada Lovelace.). This study illustrates how one mechanism -triggering -supports connective action in social media campaign.

Are You Connected Through Consumption? The Role of Hashtags in Political Consumption

“…Typically, those who have more central positions in a network on a social media platform are celebrities, politicians, and other influencers who have more followers and therefore, a greater influence than ordinary people (Lee, Kwak, Park, & Moon, 2010). In their article that discusses hashtag activism, Johri et al (2018) highlighted the importance of different actors, particularly high-profile actors who champion a cause and signal the importance of the issue. For actors who often are the hub in their communities and the leaders in such networks, social media can be a tool to foster social identity (Kende, van Zomeren, Ujhelyi, & Lantos, 2016) and increase motivation for participating in collective actions.…”

“…A vast majority (e.g., Freelon et al, 2016; Johri et al, 2018) of the literature explores hashtag activism in relation to social and political protests. However, no literature to our knowledge has explored the use of hashtags in relation to political consumerism.…”

“…Twitter hashtags also can serve as an indexing system to order and retrieve information quickly (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015). As such, social movements that originate either offline or in the digital world are commonly associated with hashtags (Johri, Karbasian, Malik, Handa, & Purohit, 2018; Yang, 2016). For example, #BoycottNFL, a call to cease all support of the NFL and their sponsors, was used to both support and oppose Kaepernick’s stance.…”

Use of Twitter across educational settings: a review of the literature

“…Furthermore, by features such as hashtags, mentions, and replies, users can network and dialog with other Twitter users (Steckenbiller, 2016). Various aspects of Twitter practices has been researched in a number of domains including tourism (Sotiriadis & van Zyl, 2013), sports (Gibbs, O'Reilly, & Brunette, 2014), governance (Haro-de-Rosario, Sáez-Martín, & del Carmen Caba-Pérez, 2016), health information (Himelboim & Han, 2014;Malik et al 2019), elections (Vergeer & Hermans, 2013), and activism (Johri et al 2018;Malik et al 2018). Besides using Twitter for entertainment and leisure, the platform is predominantly used for social interaction, information sharing, information seeking, self-documentation, and selfexpression (Alhabash & Ma, 2017;Liu, Cheung, & Lee, 2010).…”

Real-Time Inference of User Types to Assist with more Inclusive and Diverse Social Media Activism Campaigns

“…In (Johri et al 2018), the four main influential drivers of an online social campaign are detected and discussed but the focus of this paper is to analyze the user type categorization problem in the context of a social media campaign as well as with general dataset, so as to identify any specific patterns of user type characteristics.…”