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Articles

#Ferguson is everywhere: initiators in emerging counterpublic networks

&
Pages 397-418
Received 23 Jul 2015
Accepted 06 Oct 2015
Published online: 29 Dec 2015

ABSTRACT

On the afternoon of 9 August 2014, 18-year-old Michael ‘Mike’ Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri. Brown's body lay in the street for four and a half hours, and during that time, his neighbors and friends took to social media to express fear, confusion, and outrage. We locate early tweets about Ferguson and the use of the hashtag #Ferguson at the center of a counterpublic network that provoked and shaped public debates about race, policing, governance, and justice. Extending theory on networked publics, we examine how everyday citizens, followed by activists and journalists, influenced the #Ferguson Twitter network with a focus on emergent counterpublic structure and discursive strategy. We stress the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative methods to identify early initiators of online dissent and story framing. We argue that initiators and their discursive contributions are often missed by methods that collapse longitudinal network data into a single snapshot rather than investigating the dynamic emergence of crowdsourced elites over time.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Alan Mislove for providing us with the data used in this research, and for Devin Gaffney's assistance with preparing the data for analysis. We also appreciate the assistance of Sonia Banaszczyk in preparing this text. We thank members of the Ferguson network whose tireless civic engagement made this research and a blooming national conversation possible. An earlier version of this analysis was performed using Twitter data given to the authors by R-Sheif, a non-profit organization dedicated to archiving and sharing social media data to support open learning and scholarship (http://r-shief.org). Although we did not ultimately use those data in our final analysis, we are grateful for the data gift that inspired our early thinking on this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sarah J. Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University where she studies how national debates about race, gender, and social change evolve in the public sphere. Jackson's book Black celebrity, racial politics, and the press: Framing dissent (Routledge, 2014) considers the role of African-American celebrities in shaping political debates about race and protest in both the black and mainstream press. She is the PI of an interdisciplinary team researching identity and hashtag activism. She serves on the associate board of editors for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. [email: ]

Brooke Foucault Welles is an Assistant Professor in the department of Communication Studies and a faculty affiliate of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. Foucault Welles’ studies how social networks shape and constrain human behavior, with a particular emphasis on how people come to recognize resources within their social networks and leverage them to achieve personal, educational, social and political goals. Her work is published in a number of interdisciplinary journals, including The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and Big Data and Society, and she is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Web Science. [email: b.welles@neu.edu]

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