Preprint alert! "Words and Action: Modeling Linguistic Leadership in #BlackLivesMatter Communities," led by two amazing undergrads in my lab. A short 🧵 on its implications and findings: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02637 1/
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
The paper takes up the thesis of #HashtagActivism by @sarahjjackson.bsky.social @moyazb.bsky.social and @foucaultwelles.bsky.social that BLM "was able to push the mainstream public sphere on issues of social progress.” But how did this pushing happen and what issues were being pushed? 2/
We use theories from media studies -- and by @docdre.bsky.social @dfreelon.bsky.social @cmcilwain.bsky.social and @meredithdclark.bsky.social in particular -- to guide our modeling approach 3/
More specifically, we formalize the burstiness of "twitter time" with a nonlinear approach to binning our data, and we bottom-up the construction of our communities to adhere to @docdre.distributedblackness.net's claim that communities are defined by who's there and in convo at any given time 4/
We also *extensively* hand-labeled our data. This part took months, and was by far the most time-intensive part of our process. But it was important! 5/
In the end, we find that yes, activist communities do in fact introduce new words and ideas into the broader discourse, which move from the margins to the mainstream. But also: 6/
Contrary to the currently narrative about a backlash to the "woke mind virus" or whatever, it turns out that the conservative community had been engaging directly with the BLM activists from the very start, both to distort and disrupt their messaging, and to weaponize their words against them 7/
Comments