Hashtagging Politics: Transnational Anti-Fracking Movement Twitter Practices

I examine a 2-week window into an environmental movement trying to gain traction in the public sphere, centered on a transnational day of action calling for a ban on the drilling technology, high-volume hydraulic fracturing, the Global Frackdown. Twitter serves a different purpose for the anti-fracking Global Frackdown movement than other Internet-based communications, most notably email listservs. Findings show that Global Frackdown tweeters engage in framing practices of movement convergence and solidarity, declarative and targeted engagement, prefabricated messaging, and multilingual tweeting. In contrast to Global Frackdown tweeters’ use of the platform for in-the-moment communication, Global Frackdown activists report in in-depth interviews that they place more emphasis on private (i.e., listservs) communication channels for longer term, durable movement building. The episodic, crowdsourced, and often personalized, transnational framing practices of Global Frackdown tweeters support core organizers’ goal of promoting the globalness of activism to ban fracking. This research extends past scholarship on socially mediated activism by providing a case study of how environmental activists use Twitter for ephemeral movement communication during a pre-planned transnational day of action, blurring internal movement collective identity-building and affirmation with publicly enacted strategic framing

Visualizing the Paris Climate Talks on Twitter: Media and Climate Stakeholder Visual Social Media During COP21

In 2015, meeting in Paris for the Conference of the Parties (COP21), representatives of 195 nations set an ambitious goal to reach net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by mid-century. This research uses the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which took place in Paris during 30 November to 11 December 2015, as a case study of Twitter coverage of the talks by mainstream and alternative media outlets and other climate stakeholders, including activists and fossil fuel industry groups. It compares the British Guardian with other media and climate stakeholders’ visual framing of climate change on Twitter during COP21, because the publication had launched an advocacy campaign in March 2015 promoting fossil fuel divestment in the lead-up to COP21. Findings show that individual activists and movement organizations functioned similarly in climate change visual framing in Twitter posts, as did individual and organizational multinational representatives and scientific experts. The news media categories varied by type of news organization. The major outliers were the fossil fuel industry and trade association accounts. Industry stakeholders largely focused on former US President Barack Obama’s climate policy, promoting the perception of a lack of domestic support for his climate policies in their visual Twitter postings

Mediated Skewed Diffusion of Issues Information: A Theory

The modern media ecology has changed drastically over the last decade yet scholarly theoretical perspectives lag behind lay theories regarding news diffusion making it difficult to fully articulate and understand the processes driving dissemination of information and persuasion across networks and media contexts. The proposed theoretical framework takes into account extant research on the multiple mechanisms, specifically, cognitive ego involvement, the media environment, and interpersonal processes that operate in concert to influence the way information about societal issues is diffused through digital communication channels. The theoretical framework of mediated skewed diffusion of issues information provides 11 testable propositions. These are put forth to provide a foundation and encourage future research on information dissemination, online persuasion, and position polarization