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Influence of the pandemic lockdown on Fridays for Future’s hashtag activism

Social movement organizations (SMOs) increasingly rely on Twitter to create new and viral communication spaces alongside newsworthy protest events and communicate their grievance directly to the public. When the COVID-19 pandemic impeded street protests in spring 2020, SMOs had to adapt their strate...

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Autores principales: Haßler, Jörg, Wurst, Anna-Katharina, Jungblut, Marc, Schlosser, Katharina
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10345819/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37461409
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/14614448211026575
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author Haßler, Jörg
Wurst, Anna-Katharina
Jungblut, Marc
Schlosser, Katharina
author_facet Haßler, Jörg
Wurst, Anna-Katharina
Jungblut, Marc
Schlosser, Katharina
author_sort Haßler, Jörg
collection PubMed
description Social movement organizations (SMOs) increasingly rely on Twitter to create new and viral communication spaces alongside newsworthy protest events and communicate their grievance directly to the public. When the COVID-19 pandemic impeded street protests in spring 2020, SMOs had to adapt their strategies to online-only formats. We analyze the German-language Twitter communication of the climate movement Fridays for Future (FFF) before and during the lockdown to explain how SMOs adapted their strategy under online-only conditions. We collected (re-)tweets containing the hashtag #fridaysforfuture (N = 46,881 tweets, N = 225,562 retweets) and analyzed Twitter activity, use of hashtags, and predominant topics. Results show that although the number of tweets was already steadily declining before, it sharply dropped during the lockdown. Moreover, the use of hashtags changed substantially and tweets focused increasingly on thematic discourses and debates around the legitimacy of FFF, while tweets about protests and calls for mobilization decreased.
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spelling pubmed-103458192023-07-14 Influence of the pandemic lockdown on Fridays for Future’s hashtag activism Haßler, Jörg Wurst, Anna-Katharina Jungblut, Marc Schlosser, Katharina New Media Soc Articles Social movement organizations (SMOs) increasingly rely on Twitter to create new and viral communication spaces alongside newsworthy protest events and communicate their grievance directly to the public. When the COVID-19 pandemic impeded street protests in spring 2020, SMOs had to adapt their strategies to online-only formats. We analyze the German-language Twitter communication of the climate movement Fridays for Future (FFF) before and during the lockdown to explain how SMOs adapted their strategy under online-only conditions. We collected (re-)tweets containing the hashtag #fridaysforfuture (N = 46,881 tweets, N = 225,562 retweets) and analyzed Twitter activity, use of hashtags, and predominant topics. Results show that although the number of tweets was already steadily declining before, it sharply dropped during the lockdown. Moreover, the use of hashtags changed substantially and tweets focused increasingly on thematic discourses and debates around the legitimacy of FFF, while tweets about protests and calls for mobilization decreased. SAGE Publications 2021-06-28 2023-08 /pmc/articles/PMC10345819/ /pubmed/37461409 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/14614448211026575 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Articles
Haßler, Jörg
Wurst, Anna-Katharina
Jungblut, Marc
Schlosser, Katharina
Influence of the pandemic lockdown on Fridays for Future’s hashtag activism
title Influence of the pandemic lockdown on Fridays for Future’s hashtag activism
title_full Influence of the pandemic lockdown on Fridays for Future’s hashtag activism
title_fullStr Influence of the pandemic lockdown on Fridays for Future’s hashtag activism
title_full_unstemmed Influence of the pandemic lockdown on Fridays for Future’s hashtag activism
title_short Influence of the pandemic lockdown on Fridays for Future’s hashtag activism
title_sort influence of the pandemic lockdown on fridays for future’s hashtag activism
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10345819/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37461409
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/14614448211026575
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