From an election to an insurrection: Investigating differential engagement and sentiment in the #defundthepolice and #defendthepolice network on Twitter

Abstract

Social movements and their respective countermovements have evolved to use online social media platforms to recruit followers, share pertinent information, discuss relevant issues, and draw the attention of political figures. Movements’ strategic use of Twitter has increasingly been studied, though there are relatively few studies that compare social movements and their corresponding countermovements simultaneously. We examine engagement in the #DefundthePolice social movement and #DefendthePolice countermovement in a Twitter network comprised of retweets using both hashtags from August 2020 to January 2021. Text and sentiment analysis as well as a content analysis of a random sample of retweets in the network’s 20 largest subgroups reveal four key patterns. First, information commonly communicated in historical social movements is communicated in the online, Twitter network. Second, the use of movement and countermovement hashtags to criticize is common, suggesting Twitter engagement with the movement/countermovement is not a sufficient indicator of support for the movement. Third, social movements are inextricably embedded in politics, with political discourse present in all the 20 largest subgroups. Finally, though we do not include geo-tagged tweets in the analysis, physical geography is key theme in multiple subgroups. Broadly, our findings demonstrate the breadth of topics communicated within movement networks and highlight the importance of qualitatively examining Twitter data in the study of social movements.