Rogue Twitter

This collaborative project uses a sociotechnical multi-level approach to examine the Alt-Twitter movement's case that arose after the election of President Trump. This project explored how this online movement inhabits the platform and uses it to interact with state institutions, mobilize people and ideas, but more prominently to correct false information disseminated by the current administration and to create a shared understanding of the administration and the president. These findings are significant as social media platforms are increasingly incorporated into the public sphere of politics, so we will likely see online communities and social movements form, hoping to influence government actions. We conclude that Rogue Twitter is indeed a social movement as it meets a traditional social movement's characteristics. However, all organizing, framing, and mobilizing happened on Twitter. In our article entitled “Going Rogue: Reconceptualizing government employees' contentious politics on Twitter," we propose a reconceptualization of online social movements to go beyond hashtags and incorporate the organizing features of movements, online framing, and repertoires. The article was published in the First Monday journal.

Espinoza Vasquez, F., Proferes, N. ., Cooper, T. B., & Oltmann, S. M. (2021). Going rogue: Reconceptualizing government employees’ contentious politics on Twitter. First Monday, 26(7). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v26i7.11631