#HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice

communication is politics,

Network science, and its related suite of analytical methods, prioritizes social structure, rejecting the assumption implicit in much quantitative social science work that individual attributes are what matter when accounting for social outcomes.

contemporary civil society is in part constructed, maintained, and moved toward or away from change by mediated messages that inform the public.

crowdsourced elites in online activism,

Stephen Ramsay’s construct of algorithmic criticism and humanities critical theories, such as feminist and critical race theories,

in the tradition of counterpublics, use Twitter hashtags to build diverse networks of dissent and shape the cultural and political knowledge fundamental to contemporary identity-based social movements.

capability of social media to share important, time-sensitive information.

The narratives that emerge around Twitter hashtags evolve more quickly than traditional media, and for this reason Twitter has become one of the major tools for disseminating information to the public in the hope of spurring particular actions or outcomes.

union members organized large-scale protests in multiple countries in North Africa and the Middle East.