#Indigenous

Abstract

With fewer than 66% of eligible voters registered and voter turnout rates 5-14 percentage points lower than any other ethnic group, Native Americans comprise the least participatory ethnic group in U.S. political elections [42, 57, 49, 25]. While discourse surrounding Native American issues and interests has increasingly moved to social media [55, 56], there is a lack of data about Native American political discourse on these platforms. Given the heterogeneity of Native American peoples in the U.S., one way to begin approaching a holistic understanding of Native American political discourse on social media is to characterize how Native American advocates utilize social media platforms for connective action. Using a post-structural, interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, we use theories of connective action [5] and media richness [14] to analyze a Twitter data set culled from influential Native American advocates and their followers during the 2016 primary presidential election season. Our study sheds light on how Native American advocates use social media to propagate political information and identifies which issues are central to the political discourse of Native American advocates. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the bandwidth characteristics of content impact its propagation and we discuss this in the context of pernicious digital divide effects present in Indian Country.

Slacktivists or Activists?

“…The role of social platforms like Facebook and Twitter in communicating, disseminating, and organizing movements is evident [51,55], especially for public advocates and organizations [32,52]. However, from organizers' perspectives, the ubiquity of these platforms introduces new problems in controlling action, decision-making and collective identity [6].…”

Working toward Empowering a Community

“…Although not directly studying NPOs, recent research on social media use has demonstrated its usefulness in revealing public opinions on social causes. Studies focused how other populations (including LGBT, racial equality activists, and Native American advocates) practice advocacy work through social media have been conducted [6,17,49]. There has also been ample work using social media data to understand, model, and predict people's opinions on political discourse (e.g., [24,46]).…”

Protecting Oak Flat: Narratives Of Survivance As Observed Through Digital Activism

“…These types of data analytics can be beneficial for understanding and potentially predicting social phenomena especially in situations of policy decisions or in the case of activism to further understand the influence and impact of social media activism. For example, researchers (Vigil-Hayes, Duarte, Deschine Parkhurst, & Belding, 2017) tracked the connective actions of Native American advocates on Twitter to gain an in-depth understanding of the ubiquitous and pressing political issues that can and should be addressed by political actors. Consequently, the quantification of data naturally leads to measuring impact, influence, or importance, which, in the case of studying digital activism, draws challenges since events, news, and trends can shift quickly.…”

“…Hashtag use in American Indian political discourse on Twitter have been categorised in one study as representing topics of identity, civil rights, current events, and environmental issues (Vigil-Hayes, Duarte, Deschine Parkhurst, & Belding, 2017). The use of hashtags in American Indian activist efforts not only can draw attention to specific causes but also can be used to support a greater movement of similar injustices across tribal groups, or even to connect to the global Indigenous community.…”