The summer of our discontent: Anger and hope in hashtag activism

Hashtag activism, where individuals use a specific hashtag on social media networks to protest, is a widespread and powerful phenomenon. Highly personal and affective, these movements support a wide variety of causes, although current research tends to focus on more progressive ones. While specific emotions, including anger and hope, are important in offline organization, little research looks at their usage in digital activism. This dissertation focuses on how emotions, specifically anger and hope, are used in Twitter hashtag activism, and their relationship with several key aspects of online social movements. To further extend current understanding, a progressive movement, #BlackLivesMatter, and a conservative movement, Second Amendment rights, are compared. This research aimed to identify how using hope or anger in a tweet related to key topics of discussion, user commitment, and network structure. Over 14 million tweets from both movements were collected from Twitter during June 2020, and then smaller anger and hope datasets were compiled from the English language tweets. A variety of computational and quantitative methods were used. Topic modelling was used to identify key themes, and how they expand on current understandings of why and how emotions are used within activism. Statistical tests, including ANOVA, Tukey HSD and Chi-Square tests were used to understand user commitment, operationalized as repeat tweeting and including movement identifiers in user bios. Network structure and the role of structural holes was explored through network analysis and visualization. Findings from this research indicate that hope and anger are important forces within hashtag activism. Both are associated with statistically significant increases in commitment. Hope is strongly associated with community - including emotional and financial support, celebration and positive self-image-, networked protest, and strategic engagement with powerful establishment figures, businesses and organizations. Anger is strongly associated with mobilization, awareness raising, and engaging those on the periphery of the movement. Within #BlackLivesMatter it is linked to remembrance, while in the gun rights activism, it is linked to extremism, conspiracy theories, and disinformation.