Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation [1st ed.] 9783030414207, 9783030414214

Citation preview

Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation Edited by Gwen Bouvier · Judith E. Rosenbaum

Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation

Gwen Bouvier  •  Judith E. Rosenbaum Editors

Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation

Editors Gwen Bouvier English Department Zhejiang University Hangzhou, China

Judith E. Rosenbaum Department of Communication and Journalism University of Maine Orono, ME, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-41420-7    ISBN 978-3-030-41421-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41421-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Alex Linch shutterstock.com Cover design: eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Communication in the Age of Twitter: The Nature of Online Deliberation  1 Gwen Bouvier and Judith E. Rosenbaum Twitter and Democracy   2 Talking Points  13 References  15 Part I Political Contention and Civic Engagement  23 2 Going “Rogue”: National Parks, Discourses of American Identity and Resistance on Twitter 25 Joanne Marras Tate, Vincent Russell, Rachel Larsen, and Ellie Busch Introduction  25 Foucault and Identity Construction  27 The National Park Imaginary and US Identity  28 Twitter Activism and the National Park Service  30 National Identity in Connection to Land on Twitter  32 Methods  33 Findings  35 Discussion  46 Conclusion  48 References  48 v

vi 

Contents

3 Political Candidates’ Discussions on Twitter During Election Season: A Network Approach 53 Maurice Vergeer Introduction  53 The Dutch Electoral System  55 Twitter and Political Communication  56 Reciprocity and Network Homophily  56 Opinion Leadership  58 Preferential Attachment  59 Normalization Versus Equalization  60 Statistical Controls: Populism, Ideology, and Incumbency  61 Data, Measurements, and Analysis  62 Method  64 Results  64 Discussion  72 Conclusion  74 Appendix  75 References  75 4 #PeoplesVoteMarch or #LosersVoteMarch? Tracing the Collective Identity of a Post-­Brexit Referendum Movement on Twitter 79 Photini Vrikki Introduction: The Multiple Identities of Brexit  79 The Hostile Environment of a Post-Referendum UK  81 The Brexit Identity Conundrum: Ephemerality in a Commentary Pit  83 Researching #PeoplesVoteMarch on Twitter  84 Tracing People’s Vote March’s Identities on Twitter  86 Conclusion: Building an Ambiguous Collective Identity  93 References  96 Part II Inside Twitter Communities: Communication Strategies in Networked Publics  99

 Contents 

vii

5 Civic Debate and Self-Care: Black Women’s Community Care Online101 Raven Maragh-Lloyd Description of Study 103 Literature Review 104 Method: Focus Groups 108 Results: Civic Debate on Twitter Defined 110 Conclusion 117 References 118 6 The Voices of Twitter: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Racial Discourses on Twitter Following the Alt-Right March on Charlottesville, Virginia121 Sarah J. V. Dyer and Leah Hakkola Introduction 121 Discourse 123 Public Sphere 124 Counterpublics 125 Post-Racial, Colorblind Racism 126 Resistance: Analyzing Charlottesville 128 Methodology 129 Findings 132 Discussion 143 Conclusion 144 References 146 7 Covert Hate Speech: White Nationalists and Dog Whistle Communication on Twitter151 Prashanth Bhat and Ofra Klein Introduction 151 ‘Dog Whistle’ as a Discursive Strategy 153 Data and Methods 157 White Supremacist Dog Whistles on Twitter 159 Conclusion and Discussion 165 References 168

viii 

Contents

Part III The Role and Nature of Affect in Twitter Interactions 173 8 Patterns of Emotional Tweets: The Case of Brexit After the Referendum Results175 Catherine Bouko and David Garcia Emotions, Dialogue, and Social Media 176 Method 185 Results 190 Discussion 195 Conclusion 199 References 200 9 An Exploratory Mixed-Method Analysis of Interpersonal Arguments on Twitter205 Amy Janan Johnson and Ioana A. Cionea Interpersonal Arguments Offline and Online 207 Method 213 Results 217 Discussion 223 Conclusion 227 References 227 Part IV The Use of Humor and Popular Culture in Political Conversations on Twitter 233 10 Bros Before Donald Trump: Resisting and Replicating Hegemonic Ideologies in the #BROTUS Memes After the 2016 Election235 Roberta Chevrette and Christopher M. Duerringer The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election and Memetic Citizenship 237 Social Media, Memetic Citizenship, and Everyday Politics 239 Analyzing Memes: #BROTUS and the 2016 Presidential Election 241 Methodology 242 Humor and Resistance in the #BROTUS Memes 243

 Contents 

ix

Replicating Gendered and Racial Hegemonies in the #BROTUS Memes 249 Conclusion 256 References 258 11 #FamilyTravelHacks: Humor and Political Commentary in Hashtag Hijacking267 Nathan J. Rodriguez Introduction 267 Situating #FamilyTravelHacks: Public Sphere and Echo Chambers 269 Government-Citizen Interaction in Online Spaces 270 Networked (Counter)Publics and the Role of Humor 271 @TravelGov 272 Zero-Tolerance Family Separation Policy 274 Methodology 275 Government Twitter Gone Wrong: Interactions and Negative Comments 276 Affiliative Humor, Interaction, and Counterpublics: #FamilyTravelHacks Migrates Beyond Twitter 278 Conclusion 281 References 283 12 Women in Horror, Social Activism, and Twitter: Asia Argento, Anna Biller, and the Soska Sisters291 Ernest Mathijs Introduction: Blood Ties and Strong Ties 291 Social Media, Social Ties, and Aesthetics 293 Aim and Method 296 Blood Drive: Women in Horror Month 299 American Mary and the Soska Sisters 302 Horror Witches: Aesthetics and Anna Biller 304 Loss of Focus: Asia Argento 307 Conclusion 309 References 311

x 

Contents

13 Afterword: Twitter and the Democratization of Politics315 Gwen Bouvier and Judith E. Rosenbaum The Meaning of Political 317 Dissecting Resistance, Marginalization, and Dialogue 319 Community Formation on Twitter 321 Talking Points: Reconsidering Political Participation 321 References 322 Index325

Notes on Contributors

Prashanth  Bhat  is a doctoral candidate and a journalism instructor at Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park. He studies online hate speech, anti-media populism, and conservative media. Previously, Bhat worked as a journalist for leading news organizations in India and the USA. He has also served as a short-­term consultant at the World Bank and a research assistant at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Catherine  Bouko  is Assistant Professor of Communication/French in the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication at Ghent University, Belgium. Her general research interests lie in (multimodal) discourses related to citizenship, media, and separatism in Europe, in (social) media. She has written over 40 research articles, including Brexit-related articles in Visual Communication (2018) and in Discourses of Brexit (Routledge 2019) edited by Veronika Koller, Susanne Kopf, and Marlene Miglbauer. Gwen  Bouvier (PhD, University of Wales) is a Professor (Hundred Talents Programme) at Zhejiang University, China. Her main areas of research interest are social media, civic discourse, and news representation. Professor Bouvier’s publications have focused on multimodal and critical discourse analysis, social media, fashion as discourse, and the visual representation of crises in news. She is Associate Editor for Social Semiotics and Review Editor for the Journal of Multicultural Discourse. Her latest publications include Bouvier, G. (Ed.) (2016). Discourse and Social Media. London: Routledge; xi

xii 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Chiluwa, I. and Bouvier, G. (Eds.) (2019). Activism, Campaigning and Political Discourse on Twitter. New  York, NY: Nova Science; Bouvier, G., & Machin, D. (2018). Critical Discourse Analysis and the Challenge of Social Media: The Case of News Texts. Review of Communication, 18(3), 178–192 and Bouvier, G. (2019). How journalists source trending social media feeds: A critical discourse perspective on Twitter. Journalism Studies, 20(2), 212–231. Ellie Busch  is a researcher, educator, and nonprofit professional whose interests converge around community, identity, and power. Ellie graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with a master’s degree in Communication, and her forthcoming book chapter on DIY/punk communities and sexual violence discourse in online settings will be a part of the third book in the Global Punk series by Intellect Books and The University of Chicago Press. You can follow her on Twitter @ iamellieokay. Roberta  Chevrette (PhD, Arizona State University) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty at Middle Tennessee State University. Chevrette’s critical rhetorical and qualitative research employs queer, feminist, and postcolonial frameworks to interrogate gendered and racialized formations of identity, belonging, and difference. She is the coauthor of the forthcoming book, Dangerous Dames: Representing Female-Bodied Empowerment in Postfeminist Media (with Heather Hundley and Hillary Jones), and has published articles in journals including Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Feminist Formations, and Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. Ioana  A.  Cionea is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Oklahoma. Her research examines arguing-related phenomena in individuals’ interpersonal relationships or in public contexts. In addition, she also studies the multifaceted influences of culture on interpersonal communication processes. Her research has been published in multiple journals such as Argumentation, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, or Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xiii

Christopher  M.  Duerringer  (PhD, Arizona State University, 2011) is an Associate Professor in the department of Communication Studies at California State University, Long Beach. His critical research into the rhetoric of economics, inequality, and dissent has been published in Communication Theory, Communication Monographs, The Journal of Communication Inquiry, Argumentation & Advocacy, Review of Communication, Social Media + Society, The Western Journal of Communication, The Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, The Howard Journal of Communications, and The Southern Communication Journal. He has presented more than forty scholarly works at communication studies and rhetoric conferences. Sarah J. V. Dyer  is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maine. She researches diversity, race, and ethnicity within the context of higher education campuses and Twitter. David Garcia  is a group leader at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, where he leads a research group funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund. He holds computer science degrees from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain) and ETH Zurich (Switzerland). Garcia’s research focuses on computational social science, designing models and analyzing human behavior through digital traces. His main work revolves around the topics of emotions, privacy, and political polarization, combining statistical analyses of large datasets of online interaction with agent-based modeling of individual behavior. Leah Hakkola  is an Assistant Professor in the Higher Education Program at the University of Maine. Her scholarship focuses on how discourses of diversity and equity shape and are informed by educational policies and practices and how these discourses affect success for faculty, students, and staff. She has published in a variety of outlets, including Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, the Journal of Student Affairs, and Innovative Higher Education. Amy  Janan  Johnson (PhD, Michigan State University, 1999) is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Oklahoma. She conducts research on discourse-dependent families, interpersonal argument, and relationship maintenance. She has published

xiv 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

in such venues as Communication Monographs, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, among others. Ofra Klein  is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, where she works on far-right online mobilization. She previously served as a research assistant at VU University Amsterdam and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She was also a visiting fellow at the Weizenbaum Institut in Berlin as well as Sciences Po in Paris. Rachel  Larsen is finishing up a master’s degree in Communication Studies at CU Boulder, where she also runs the University’s Restorative Justice program. Interested in community-building, relational approaches to justice, and dialogic practices, Rachel plans to continue studying in higher education to pursue these topics. Most recently, Rachel developed Restorative Justice curriculum for students at CU who are interested in becoming RJ practitioners. You can follow her on Twitter @RachelKayLarsen. Raven Maragh-Lloyd  is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Gonzaga University. Her scholarship makes central the ways that Black and African American publics tap into long-existing channels of communication toward the context-specific goals of community, survival, and visibility. Dr. Maragh-Lloyd’s work has appeared in Communication, Culture & Critique, Television and New Media, Journal of Communication Inquiry, and the Handbook of Diasporas, Media, and Culture. Ernest  Mathijs is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He specializes in audience and reception research on what is commonly called genre cinema and cult movies. His most recent project is a study of activist and feminist actress Delphine Seyrig. Nathan J. Rodriguez  is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication and Public Relations at Weber State University. His research examines the process of meaning-making in online spaces, and his work has been published in books and journals including Qualitative Inquiry and Journalism Practice.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

xv

Judith  E.  Rosenbaum (PhD, Radboud University Nijmegen) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of Maine. Her research focuses on the impact of digital media on daily life, political dialogue and meaning making on social media platforms, media selection and enjoyment, and media and health literacy. Her work has appeared in publications such as Media Psychology, Communication Research, Psychology of Popular Media Culture, Communication Teacher, and Journal of Media Psychology. She published her first book Constructing Digital Cultures: Tweets, Trends, Race, and Gender with Lexington in 2018. Vincent  Russell is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research emphasizes communication activism for social justice, applied communication, and community-based research methods. His academic writings can be found in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Annals of the International Communication Association, and Communication Education. You can follow him on Twitter @vincent_russell. Joanne  Marras  Tate studies Environmental Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Communication. Her current work is in Brazil looking at aquariums. She also investigates and learns from indigenous epistemologies on environmental conservation, public engagement of science, virtual reality, and participates on scientific research on microplastics. You can follow her on Twitter @ Jo_Marras. Maurice  Vergeer is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Science, Behavioural Science Institute of the Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His research interests range from social media use by politicians and citizens during election campaigns, cross-cultural differences in use of social media, to news production in the digital age, and computational social sciences. His research is published in journals such as Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media and Society, and Information, Communication and Society. Photini  Vrikki (PhD, Digital Culture and Society, King’s College London) is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture at King’s College London. Her work focuses on the links between social and digital inequalities, power and data, and algorithmic culture. By combining multidisciplinary approaches with concepts and theories drawn from

xvi 

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

sociology, political economy, and cultural theory, her work explores how digital media can be used to both reinforce and challenge racism, inequality, and oppression; and the questions of power, agency, and ideology within the digital, cultural, and creative economies.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4

Fig. 2.5

Fig. 2.6 Fig. 3.1

Tweet shared by @AltYelloNatPark account on February 9th, 2017. “Yellowstone Geyser Rainbow,” photo credit: Larry Gerbrandt. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ larrygerbrandt/292124275. All rights reserved 36 Tweet shared by @BadHombreNPS account on February 1st, 2017. “Tilted ice, rosy sunrise,” photo credit: Steven Bratman. https://www.flickr.com/photos/darkdenver/6971654379. Some rights reserved 37 Tweet shared by @BadHombreNPS account on February 1st, 2017. “Roosevelt and Muir at Glacier Point,” National Park Services. https://www.nps.gov/media/photo/gallery-item. htm?pg=0&id=B15B62A7-155D-4519-3EF7442B3F6E7AF8 &gid=B17BC4E5-155D-4519-3EC6B73FCE2806A8. Public domain38 Tweet shared by @BadHombreNPS account on February 7th, 2017. “Western Meadowlark,” photo credit: Rick Bohn. Author: USFWS Mountain-­Prairie. https://www.flickr.com/ photos/usfwsmtnprairie/25404358384/. Some rights reserved 42 Tweet shared by @BadHombreNPS account on January 27th, 2017. “Raptor,” photo credit: Jean Beaufort. https://www. publicdomainpictures.net/es/view-image.php?image=232818& picture=raptor. Some rights reserved 43 Tweet shared by @AltMtRainier account on January 27th, 2017 44 Political candidate communication network Note: the aggregated network is directed, includes loops, and the layout is Fruchterman-Reingold force-­directed. Nodes size (weight) represents communication indegree 64 xvii

xviii 

List of Figures

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Political party communication network Note: the aggregated communication network is directed, the layout is Fruchterman-Rheingold. Nodes size represents communication outdegree Candidate communication indegree and communication outdegree homophily, the assortativity index by political party Note: Dots represent candidates; Boxes are 1.5 IQR below and above the mean; political parties are ordered by ballot position. Candidates with an indegree or outdegree higher than 250 are labeled; R2indegree = 6.4%, R2outdegree = 16.6% Level of mutuality by political party Note: Dots represent candidates; Boxes are 1.5 IQR below and above the mean; Political parties are ordered by ballot position; Candidates with more than 25 mutual relations are labeled; R2 = 15.1% Building tasks and tools of inquiry protocol. (Gee, 2011; Hakkola, 2015) Interactions and convergences of Discourses

65

67

69 131 133

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 8.1 Table 8.2 Table 8.3 Table 8.4 Table 8.5 Table 8.6 Table 8.7 Table 8.8

Network centrality 66 Level of assortativity for specific candidate attributes 68 Multilevel negative binomial regression analysis of communicative indegree and communicative outdegree 70 Frequency of each type of interpersonal functions in our corpus of tweets (N = 2162)191 Frequency of each type of writer in our corpus of tweets with inter-­coder agreement (N = 1171)191 Frequency of each type of speech function in our corpus of tweets with inter-coder agreement (N = 1136)192 Frequency of each type of layers of emotion in our corpus of tweets with inter-coder agreement on all types of layers of emotion (N = 1125)192 Frequency of each type of criterion when supported emotion in our corpus of tweets with inter-coder agreement about the layers of emotion and about each criterion (N = 1001)193 Frequency of each type of valence patterns in our corpus of tweets with inter-coder agreement on the types of layers of emotion and on the types of valence patterns (N = 1067)193 Associations of layers of emotion in our corpus of tweets with inter-­coder agreement about all types of layers of emotion (N = 1125)195 Associations of inscribed and supported emotions with types of writers in our corpus of tweets with inter-coder agreement about all types of layers of emotion and types of writers (N = 1104)196

xix

CHAPTER 1

Communication in the Age of Twitter: The Nature of Online Deliberation Gwen Bouvier and Judith E. Rosenbaum

Politicians who tweet their pending decisions on major political issues, a prime minister who is called out about racist behaviors from his past, weather service organizations that tweet about approaching winter storms, social movements that are created, blossom, and whither: in the past decade, Twitter has deftly moved beyond the “what’s happening” prompt that led early critics to describe the platform’s content as banal and self-­ involved. While it is still the platform where people go to share the best cup of coffee they ever had, it has also become the space where politicians, activists, and regular citizens voice their opinions, seek out like-minded others, and spar with those on the other side of the aisle. It is the platform that unleashed the voices that stood against media giants such as Harvey

G. Bouvier (*) English Department, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China e-mail: [email protected] J. E. Rosenbaum Department of Communication and Journalism, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Bouvier, J. E. Rosenbaum (eds.), Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41421-4_1

1

2 

G. BOUVIER AND J. E. ROSENBAUM

Weinstein in the form of #MeToo, and the space that facilitated and helped grow #Blacklivesmatter into an internationally known phenomenon (Jackson, Bailey, & Foucault Welles, 2020). Hashtags such as these have shaped lives, futures, as well as national, and international history. And it is hashtags such as these that have reinvigorated the debate about the nature of civic dialogue in a Web 2.0 world. The argument regarding Twitter’s role in contemporary democracies has been carried out in both academic and popular circles and connects back to the decades-old debate regarding the quality of political conversations. The arrival of new media, especially of Web 2.0 platforms like Twitter, has reinvigorated this debate. Utilizing Habermas’ oft-cited work (e.g., 1987), scholars have debated whether Twitter represents a public space where people come together to discuss issues relevant to society at large. Most research on Twitter as a political forum to date has either taken a techno-optimistic (e.g., Rosenbaum, 2018) or a far more techno-­ skeptic approach (e.g., Bouvier, 2015), conducting research from the assumption that Twitter is either the start of a new era in democracy, or the platform that will mark the end of democracy as we know it. This leaves the question at the heart of this debate unanswered though: how do people utilize Twitter to communicate and what insight does the nature and quality of this communication provide into whether and how Twitter can function as a public sphere? This volume will address this question and more by taking a closer look at the nature of Twitter-based communication. In the remainder of this introduction, we will provide a brief overview of the various facets of this debate and introduce the content of this book. In contrast to many of the more recent, high-­profile books on Twitter and political action (e.g., Florini, 2019; Jackson et al., 2020; Tufekci, 2017) that present a mostly positive view of the platform’s potential, this book presents a much more cautious view, one related to the increasing fragmentation of politics and the rise of populism, symbolism, the affective, and incivility.

Twitter and Democracy It didn’t take long for scholars and popular commentators alike to point to Twitter as either a site of a revitalization of political dialogue or a space that did little to enhance Western democracies. According to some, Twitter is a place where those formerly excluded from public dialogue may be heard beyond the boundaries of their immediate communities, creating

1  COMMUNICATION IN THE AGE OF TWITTER: THE NATURE OF ONLINE… 

3

huge potential for the sharing of ideas, points of view, and interests (e.g., Castells, 2015; Tufekci, 2017). Others argue, however, that Twitter, with its 280-character messages, its tendency to create clusters of like-minded people, and its ever-shifting focus, does little to create the kind of dialogue needed to bolster contemporary democracy (e.g., Al-Tahmazi, 2015; Gerbaudo, 2012; Hall Jamieson & Cappella, 2008; Pariser, 2011). Twitter Revolutions and Radicals When making the case that Twitter has revitalized democracy, some scholars will point at the most obvious examples wherein people’s ability to communicate using the platform led to actual, tangible outcomes and, in some case, real change. Twitter has played a role in many recent political uprisings, with users relying on the platform to organize and mobilize out of reach of state surveillance and/or censorship (e.g., Penney & Dadas, 2013; Poell & Borra, 2012; Poell & Van Dijck, 2015). Twitter and other social media have also been pointed to as key elements in the Arab Spring and other protests across the Middle East (e.g., Bruns, Highfield, & Burgess, 2013; Jansen, 2010). Moreover, research has looked into Twitter’s role in social movements in the Ukraine (Ronzhyn, 2014), mobilizations against the government in Turkey (Gerbaudo, 2012; Tufekci, 2017), and how in China, localized forms of Twitter are a way for people to negotiate state control and surveillance (Yang, 2014). In all these cases, Twitter is seen as the conduit to a more open and inclusive democracy. But were these events the outcome of communication via Twitter? Or did social media platforms merely facilitate the communication amongst activists and were the revolutions now commonly referred to as the Arab Spring the result of geopolitical events, not the tools that activists happened to use (e.g., Rane & Salem, 2012)? Scholars who are less optimistic about Twitter’s democratizing potential would argue in favor of the latter, claiming, among other things, that social media as a whole and Twitter in particular can be harnessed and colonized by undemocratic interests and authoritarian regimes (Creemers, 2017; MacKinnon, 2011; Morozov, 2011). Furthermore, the forms of activism that Twitter has been used to mobilize may not always be democratic at heart, but instead be associated with radicalization and promote extremist or even violent aims (Gentleman, 2011; Huey, 2015).

4 

G. BOUVIER AND J. E. ROSENBAUM

These are, obviously, extreme cases. Twitter revolutions, if they can be called that, happen very rarely. What about all those other movements that were born on Twitter? Movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, which might not be directly connected to a physical outcome such as a revolution but that do reflect on political issues. Are these little more than clicktivism or slacktivism (Karpf, 2010), that is, tweets that require very little engagement and subsequently have minimal coherent impact (Morozov, 2011)? Or is it possible that even this kind of political engagement might, as Enli (2017a) put it, “be important and meaningful for the individuals and [qualify as] legitimate political acts” (p. 221)? To answer these questions, it is imperative to dive into the political talk seen on Twitter. Twitter and Political Communication When considering how people use Twitter to discuss issues that are relevant to society at large, one notion that comes up frequently is the idea that the platform has taken on a Fifth Estate role: it has leveled the playing field by allowing citizens to hold politicians more accountable and offering a potential for ongoing dialogue and open communication (e.g., Dutton, 2009; Lilliker & Jackson, 2010; Tromble, 2018). Research on this topic is far from unequivocal, though. Some has found that politicians still mainly engage with other politicians and not with regular citizens, suggesting that despite its democratizing potential, Twitter remains highly hierarchical and exclusive (e.g., Bruns & Highfield, 2013; Graham, Broersma, Hazelhoff, & van’t Haar 2013). At the same time, politicians have been shown to use Twitter to engage with citizens in actual dialogue (e.g., Graham, Jackson, & Broersma, 2016; Larsson & Ihlen, 2015; Tromble, 2018), although not always with the desired, deliberative effects (Theocharis, Barberá, Fazekas, Popa, & Parnet, 2016), suggesting that in some cases Twitter can serve to decrease the distance between citizens and their leaders. The notion of Twitter as the ‘great equalizer’ is also often linked to the platform’s most famous affordance: the hashtag. The hashtag allows people from all walks of life to connect on shared concerns and issues (e.g., Rosenbaum, 2018). In the case of some hashtags, such as #MeToo, this capacity to hold the powerful accountable certainly seems evident. However, rather than encouraging open debate, hashtags can also become a kind of “framing contest” (Enli & Simonsen, 2018, p.1085) where

1  COMMUNICATION IN THE AGE OF TWITTER: THE NATURE OF ONLINE… 

5

those who create them seek to shape events with associations and meanings that support their own interests (Rambukkana, 2015a). Hashtags have also been argued to misrepresent movements (Papacharissi, 2016) and can be the source of friction between activists and outsiders such as advertising companies, mainstream media, or even politicians who seek to manipulate the hashtag’s meaning to their own benefit (Rambukkana, 2015a, 2015b). And crucially, hashtags, at least those that gain more posts, are rarely ‘bottom-­up’ but are generated by elite users, journalists, influencers, and celebrities (e.g., Bruns et  al., 2013; Enli & Simonsen, 2018), the same elite users who get re-tweeted, often by each other, and who understand the processes that drive trending (Hermida, Lewis, & Zamith, 2014; Page, 2012; Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira, 2012; Siapera, Hunt, & Lynn, 2015). The power of social media’s algorithms in determining who sees which posts, and consequently which hashtags, should also not be underestimated when discussing Twitter’s potential to level the playing field. As Rambukkana (2015b) argues, profit-driven algorithms determine what each user’s timeline looks like, thus impacting to a large degree which hashtags gain traction and which do not. Bouvier (2019) has shown how it is elite users, and those who are highly media literate, who form a key characteristic of what drives Twitter feeds. In other words, it is important to be realistic as to the elite nature of access to, and use of, Twitter (cf. Van Laer & Van Aelst, 2010). In a similar vein, Twitter has been described as affording interaction between a wide variety of people. Twitter has been compellingly celebrated for how it allows marginalized groups, especially those who share similar political concerns, to connect outside their physical community and build what has been described as networks of dissent (e.g., Jackson et al., 2020), which can then be used to mobilize physical collective action (e.g., Tufekci, 2017). However, previous work into the nature of interactions on Twitter has shown that Twitter tends to function as an echo chamber with users associating mainly with like-minded individuals, seeking encouragement rather than reaching out for cross-ideological conversations or even engagement (e.g., Del Valle & Borge Bravo, 2018; Guerrero-Solé, 2018; Guo, Rhode, & Wu, 2018). While social media can indeed provide a voice to ideologies not formerly carried by traditional top-down media, such voices tend to remain limited to clusters, that is, individuals connected on Twitter who share similar interests and points of view (e.g., Himelboim et al., 2016, p. 1382). Repeated interaction with

6 

G. BOUVIER AND J. E. ROSENBAUM

others holding similar points of view can lead to a strengthening of these ideas, something Borgatti and Foster (2003, p. 1005) refer to as contagion (cf. Bartlett, 2014). Rather than fostering wider civic debate, these clusters enable opinions that tend to become hardened in the absence of alternative views or evidence and render the circulation of alternative ideas even more unlikely (Baumgaertner, Tyson, & Krone, 2016; Jacobs & Spierings, 2018). At the same time, some studies suggest that Twitter might not be as much of an echo chamber as one might expect—users do encounter more diverse political points of view and new kinds of information on Twitter (Colleoni, Rozza, & Arvidsson, 2014; Zuiderveen Borgesius, Trilling, Möller, Bodó, de Vreese, & Helberger, 2016). Work on the Swiss referendum on the Nuclear Withdrawal Initiative, for example, found that while the various opinions and interests solidified into different communities, there was robust cross-community dialogue on Twitter (Arlt, Rauchfleisch, & Schäfer, 2019). There is, in other words, simply the need for more research to investigate these issues—research that considers more diverse political systems, situations, and events. When considering political communication on Twitter, it is vital to look beyond who talks with whom, and to consider the nature of these conversations as well. Habermas (e.g., 2006, see also Flynn, 2004) noted that the public sphere, that is, the public space where people come together to discuss issues relevant to society at large, is characterized by communicative action, the kind of everyday talk that helps people understand one another, create relationships, and make decisions. It is this specific kind of talk that produces the communicative rationality needed for deliberative democracy (Flynn, 2004; Kim & Kim, 2008). When discussing communicative action, however, it is important to consider Habermas’ critics. As Horowitz (2013) writes, the notion that everyday talk can take place outside existing power structures, that it will involve participants who are all able to “voice their opinions freely and honestly”, and may result in an “unselfish” consideration of the optimal solution (pp. 2344–5) has been deemed unrealistic by many. She points to Mouffe’s (1999, 2000) agonistic pluralism as a much more viable alternative. According to this point of view, disagreements, conflict, and arguments are not just a part of everyday life and everyday talk, but a driving force in contemporary Western democracies. A question for further research, however, is whether this is the case if these disagreements take place isolated from each other in echo

1  COMMUNICATION IN THE AGE OF TWITTER: THE NATURE OF ONLINE… 

7

chambers. After all, it is possible that these agonistic conversations are limited to their own insular networks, simply stoking their own uncivility, rather than participating in any civic process. Funny, Banal, and Highly Personal: Citizenship on Twitter Even though Habermas has argued that the modern public sphere has been irrevocably altered due to the mass media, some have argued that it can be brought back to life through speech communities that rely on communicative action (Kruse, Norris, & Flinchum, 2018). While Kruse et al.’s exploratory qualitative examination appears to indicate that social media do not create these speech communities because users do not utilize these spaces for political interactions, this foregoes the question whether communication has to be manifestly “political” to be considered communicative action. Everyday talk is Twitter’s core business. But whether it qualifies as communicative action or even agonistic pluralism depends on the nature of the talk and requires that scholars think outside of what is commonly seen as political conversations. A difficult task since opinions diverge on what qualifies as political talk. Drawing a comparison to Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, Ott (2017) questions whether Twitter actually allows for political debates. Like television, most of the content on Twitter is pretty trivial, Ott posits, pointing to several studies that have made these claims. And in accordance with what Postman (1985) said about television, Ott argues it is not the high level of banality or the trivial nature of most of what is posted on Twitter that is the problem, but the fact that when conversations on Twitter do engage with social, political, and moral issues, Twitter “…promotes public discourse that is simple, impetuous, and frequently denigrating” (2017, p.  60). Following similar concerns, Krzyěanowski and Ledin (2017) suggest that the nature of political conversations in today’s Web 2.0 era has seen a fundamental shift away from more concrete discussions to simplified exchanges based on buzzwords and symbolism. The affordances of the short posts, Twitter’s fast-moving nature, and the need to attract likes to be visible, means Twitter favors emotionally charged posts that simplify ongoing events without any eye for nuance or complexity (e.g., Enli, 2017b; Engesser, Ernst, Esser, & Büchel, 2016). The platform encourages encourage self-promotionalism (Page, 2012) with a large number of tweets

8 

G. BOUVIER AND J. E. ROSENBAUM

focusing on impression management and self-branding (Enli, 2015; Kreiss, 2016; Page, 2012). The question this raises then is whether this simplified, emotion-driven, and mostly ‘trivial’ content is indeed meaningless. The case has been made that some forms of this kind of self-expression can be seen as a form of political engagement too. When people talk about and engage with popular culture, leisure activities, and other factors of everyday life, this, some argue, can be seen as a form of citizenship, cultural citizenship to be specific (e.g., Müller & Hermes, 2010). In fact, viewing the public sphere and constructive dialogue as connected to political and civic discussions only, is a narrow and exclusive view, one that particularly disadvantages groups commonly excluded from the mainstream public sphere (Burgess, Foth, & Klaebe, 2006). Conversely, cultural citizenship holds that citizen engagement can take multiple forms and occur across “multiple modes of discourse, including affect and pleasure” (Burgess et al., 2006, p. 3). Cultural citizenship is about the creation of bonds between people, and the cultural public sphere is commonly said to have a “cross-ethnic reach” (Müller & Hermes, 2010, p.  194), connecting people through shared experiences and identities that can be cognitive as well as highly affective (McGuian, 2005; Müller & Hermes, 2010). As Papacharissi (2009) points out, while these kinds of expressions and interactions may appear highly self-absorbed and even narcissistic, they can still be seen as moving the democratic process along, precisely because of their ability to bring personal issues into the public domain. Unlike Habermas’ approach to dialogic pluralism, or even Mouffe’s (1999, 2000) agonistic pluralism, these expressions center on communication rather than outcome, forming the speech communities that Kruse et al. (2018) talked about as the solution to the faltering traditional public sphere. It is essential to note this view of citizenship does not necessarily contradict Habermas’ view of the public sphere. Habermas viewed everyday talk as an inexorable part of political communication (2006) and described the communicative rationality that forms the basis for the public sphere as occurring inside people’s “lifeworlds” (McGuian, 2005, p. 434), implying that even ‘trivial’ talk can be political. As Dahlgren (2018) points out, the political doesn’t just refer to interactions with formal institutions, but to the struggle inherent to all relationships and settings, from the personal to the official. But, this leaves the question: what kind of democratic contribution do the conversations characterized by buzzwords, symbolism,

1  COMMUNICATION IN THE AGE OF TWITTER: THE NATURE OF ONLINE… 

9

simplified narratives, and at times the seemingly highly trivial, offer, especially if these take place inside echo chambers? Affective Connectivity and Emotions on Twitter While people commonly view politics and public dialogue as cognitive in nature, it is not accurate to exclude affect as irrational or counterproductive to this kind of dialogue. Reason and passion go hand-in-hand, and are an integral part of people’s everyday lived experiences that constitute the public sphere. In fact, it is only through emotional involvement that people become engaged with politics (Dahlgren, 2018) and it is through affect that people experience empathy and actively consider ways in which to bring change to society at large (Horowitz, 2013; McGuian, 2005; Papacharissi, 2016). Recently, media scholars have worked to apply this principle to social media. Papacharissi (2016) examines how many of the social-media-based discussions surrounding the Egyptian revolution were comprised of affect rather than the rational, producing a continual sense of movement and change even when there were no new developments. The “emotive” nature of the tweets “helped to frame the movement as a revolution well before it had resulted in regime reversal” (p. 313). Bouvier (2020) makes a similar argument with the example of #MeToo, observing that the Twitter feed itself contained little in the form of coherent rational statements. Rather, it was comprised of floods of affect, communicated in different ways, where different posts often had highly different agendas and where posts were far from logically engaged with any core set of ideas in the thread. Social media’s affordances don’t just allow but promote emotional expressions and responses as a form of participation (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018). The “storytelling infrastructure” (Papacharissi, 2014, p.  4) that underpins social media expressions and exchanges creates a sense of presence and immediacy that has rendered emotional displays of engagement an integral part of the formation of networked publics and the creation of change. The platforms’ affordances allow for the melding of politics, news, and the personal and affective, effectively erasing the divide between ratio and emotion. Considering that social media are some of the most popular ways to obtain news and participate in political discussions and the fact that these same platforms have been designed to put users’ emotions at the forefront impacts the nature of contemporary political debate,

10 

G. BOUVIER AND J. E. ROSENBAUM

implying that emotion can no longer be ignored as an element of civic dialogue (cf. Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018). Moreover, using “emotive expressions” on social media allows for the creation of affective networked publics: connections between users founded on the sharing of emotions about a particular issue or event (Papacharissi, 2016, p.  320). These affective networks can lead to political and social movements that may bring about change. But even if they don’t, Papacharissi (2016) argues, this affective participation may still be able to bring about wider shifts in attitudes and grant a sense of agency to those participating in the feed. She calls this connective action. Here she emphasizes that people are able to connect and raise a particular kind of issue that can have ideological relevance, even though it may lack any clear sense of having a rational and clear argument, solution, or plan. However, Bouvier (2020) raises the issue that if the actual concrete nature of the problem and the ongoing events becomes unclear in the flow of affect, then it may lose the power of communicative rationality (cf. Habermas, 1987). As Dahlgren (2018) states: just because people are emotionally involved does not guarantee they will actually engage in political action. In fact, he argues that the same affordances that make it so easy to become emotionally engaged, the speed and ephemerality of social media platforms, are those that facilitate keeping one’s political engagement limited to a single affective response. Although, again, other work has provided compelling evidence that there are clear links between social media activity and social mobilization, particularly in the case of disenfranchised groups (e.g., Jackson et al., 2020). Concerns about the emotive nature of many Twitter expressions are not just limited to their potential impact. Scholars have also expressed concern about the ease with which one can send out a tweet, and what this means for the quality of those tweets (Ott, 2017). In fact, research has shown that Twitter creates an environment wherein tweeting is impulsive and driven by feelings rather than the result of a deliberate thought process (Wang, Zhou, Jin, Fang, & Lee, 2017). As a result, “tweets are often sparked by an affective charge” (Ott, 2017, p. 61), and, more importantly, it is often the most emotional tweets that will receive the most retweets, rendering those who post emotional tweets more likely to gain influence (Stieglitz & DangXuan, 2013; see also Ott, 2017). Even when conversations start as rational debate, one snark comment left by a user who then withdraws from the conversation can cause these interactions to degenerate into insults

1  COMMUNICATION IN THE AGE OF TWITTER: THE NATURE OF ONLINE… 

11

(Bouvier, 2015). The brevity of tweets and the speed with which conversations evolve and disappear have also been pointed to as reasons for the normalization of hateful terms and attitudes and why Twitter is seen as the ideal platform for “politics of outrage, scapegoating, hatred, and attack” (Fuchs, 2017, p. 54; cf. Foxman & Wolf, 2013). Community Building, Inclusion, and Marginalization One of the main critiques of the Habermasian public sphere is its failure to account for the exclusion of suppressed groups from the conversations inside the public sphere. In response, these groups have created their own so-­ called counterpublics; spaces wherein members connect to create shared understandings of their own identities and needs that counter dominant narratives (Fraser, 1992). These counterpublics were commonly created away from public view and were thus limited in their reach and ability to influence mainstream ideas (e.g., Schofield Clark, 2016). With the arrival of social media platforms such as Twitter, however, this has changed. As numerous scholars (e.g., Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2015, Kuo, 2018) have shown, one of Twitter’s defining affordances is its ability to connect diverse groups of people into a networked (counter)public. Scholars have pointed at Black Twitter, that is, African Americans’ use of the platform to perform their racial identity (e.g., Brock, 2012; Florini, 2014) as well as the feminist movement (Sills et al., 2016) as prime examples. Connected to the fact that Twitter has been especially heralded for its ability to give voice to groups that have been historically marginalized from the mainstream media (Pew Research Center, 2018), it is no surprise that marginalized communities have been found to utilize the platform to strengthen their own identities and be heard outside their own social networks, from women of color challenging the whiteness inherent in most feminism (Jackson & Banaszczyk, 2016; Kuo, 2018), to social justice activists undermining a New York City Police Department PR campaign (Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2015). This connectivity has mainly been attributed to the hashtag. As mentioned above, the hashtag allows people from a variety of backgrounds and locations to find each other over a shared interest, as the hashtag renders conversations visible across groups (e.g., Kuo, 2018; Rambukkana, 2015b). It also allows people to use hashtags to find posts with which they disagree and comment on those, or use a hashtag counter to its intended meaning, so-called “content injection” (Conover, Ratkiewicz, Gonçales,

12 

G. BOUVIER AND J. E. ROSENBAUM

Flammmini, & Menczer, 2011, p. 94). This effectively creates “interdiscursive contestation” (Dahlberg, 2007, p.  16) wherein marginalized groups counter dominant discourses (cf. Chan, 2018). Conversely, it also allows for the insertion of a dominant narrative into a countercultural discourse and hashtag (e.g., Carney, 2016). On the flipside, the affordances that render Twitter such an effective place for marginalized groups to connect also provide opportunities for extremist groups commonly excluded from the mainstream public sphere to unite and attempt to influence dominant narratives (cf. Neumayer & Valtysson, 2013). As Rosenbaum (2018) found in her analysis of Trump supporters on Twitter, it is the perception of marginalization, not actual marginalization, coupled with the platform’s promotion of networked connections that prompts people to take to Twitter. In her analysis, Trump supporters indicated feeling excluded from and ridiculed by the mainstream media, and used Twitter to seek like-minded individuals and recognition. The Alt-right has actively used social media, especially sites like Reddit, 4chan, and 8chan, but also Twitter, to promote and gain wider acceptance of their ideas and attack people of color and other minorities (Heikkilä, 2017). The Far Left has also taken to Twitter, and the rhetoric that has emerged from the clashes between the two has not only been pointed to as a reason behind the increasing polarization in US politics, but has also raised concerns about causing actual physical damage (Klein, 2019). When discussing Twitter counterpublics, it is important, as Brunner (2017) explained, to move to thinking about these as wild public networks. This entails prioritizing the connections between people as the main focus of research and acknowledging that online publics are never stable but continually changing, characterized by “growing, shifting, and messy relationships” (p.  669). Affect is an integral part of wild public networks, which are conceptualized as unpredictable, mediated, and “forged and maintained by banal communication” (p.  671) or “affective pleas” that can include memes, funny videos, or GIFs (Dawson & Brunner, 2019, p. 4). The tactical network dynamics of social media should also be considered when discussing the communities and networks created by Twitter. While it is tempting to point to the creation of networks as a move driven by a desire for social change, users can also deliberately opt to network strategically in order to develop and foster “structural capital” (Kane, Alavi, Labianca, & Borgatti, 2014, p.  290). In this case, users carefully

1  COMMUNICATION IN THE AGE OF TWITTER: THE NATURE OF ONLINE… 

13

consider who they link to and organize ties with to create a network that may be of strategical advantage for themselves. Page (2012) has looked at social media as a kind of “linguistic marketplace” (p. 181), wherein users utilize language to gain attention and, in some cases, social and economic capital. From that perspective, a platform like Twitter is as much about tactical self-branding through “synthetic personalization” (Page, 2012, p. 198) as it is about communication and advancing social change.

Talking Points As is evident from the discussion so far, the jury is still out when it comes to the nature of communication on Twitter. Specifically, questions remain about the nature of the everyday talk that makes up most of the communication on Twitter. What kinds of conversations unfold on the platform, and do these contribute to, or even qualify as, civic debate? What does political dialogue on Twitter look like? What discursive strategies do Twitter users employ and how do these foreground or background specific voices? And, finally, can Twitter be said to function as a modern-day public sphere? In the body of research on Twitter so far, it is clear that there are instances that create a positive case for its democratic potential. But there is enough scholarship that suggests we need to ask more questions, specifically ones that focus on a wide range of domains and issues. This collection takes a step toward answering these questions, but at the same time offers, perhaps uniquely (at least at the time of publication), a message of caution about the role of Twitter in contemporary democracy. This volume looks at the role of Twitter in civic debate and participation through a series of empirical case studies. These case studies all approach Twitter from a communication-centered perspective, taking a social scientific approach, rather than one founded in computational or information science. The case studies, however, do take a variety of theoretical perspectives, addressing a broad selection of topics through a diverse array of methodological approaches. The first section “Political Contention and Civic Engagement” focuses on how Twitter is used for the kind of communication action that Habermas had in mind when conceptualizing the public sphere: everyday talk centered on political issues. The three chapters in this section show how the communicative rationality advocated by Habermas can be messy and contradictory, with various actors engaging with and countering dominant narratives in rational and emotional as well as humorous and

14 

G. BOUVIER AND J. E. ROSENBAUM

sarcastic ways. In Chapter 2, Joanne Marras Tate, Vincent Russell, Rachel Larsen, and Ellie Busch examine how alternate National Park Service accounts utilize Twitter as a space to resist the Trump administration while still promoting dominant and romanticized understandings of US national identity. In Chapter 3, Maurice Vergeer uses a communication network approach to investigate how politicians interact on Twitter. Photini Vrikki uses Narrative Thematic Analysis to provide insight into how Twitter users employed the #PeoplesVoteMarch hashtag to create a community with shared understandings regarding Brexit and the future of the UK in Chapter 4. The second section looks at the nature of communication within and between networked counterpublics. As a platform that has been heralded for its ability to bring marginalized people together, it is relevant to understand what communication inside these networks looks like. In Chapter 5, Raven Maragh-Lloyd provides insight into the strategies of care that Black women utilize to be able to participate in online conversations. Her work reveals the nature and extent of the labor it takes for Black women to be heard and assert themselves in online spaces. Sarah Dyer and Leah Hakkola, in Chapter 6, examine the responses to the 2017 Alt-right march held in Charlottesville, Virginia for evidence of cross-public dialogue. Their findings underscore the prevalence of the colorblind discourse in conversations about race and highlight how the lack of interaction appears to feed the current political polarization. Prashanth Bhat and Ofra Klein examine how White Nationalists communicate on Twitter using a tactic known as dog whistling in Chapter 7. Their work offers a more profound understanding of how extremist counterpublics work to convey their ideologies while circumventing Twitter’s hate speech policies. The third section of this volume examines the role played by emotion in everyday talk on Twitter. As discussed above, research is divided on whether emotions are an irrelevant or even undesirable component of political communication. What is known is that they are an inexorable part of how people communicate about politics, especially on Twitter. Therefore, understanding how they work within political communication is paramount. In Chapter 8, Catherine Bouko and David Garcia analyze responses to the outcome of the Brexit referendum. Using a text-based quantitative content analysis, they find that tweets often combine affect, appreciation, and judgment, doing little to promote deliberative interaction, and reflecting extant polarization on the topic of the UK leaving the EU. Chapter 9, authored by Amy Janan Johnson and Ioana Cionea, looks

1  COMMUNICATION IN THE AGE OF TWITTER: THE NATURE OF ONLINE… 

15

specifically at the nature of arguments on Twitter. Using results from a survey among Twitter users, Johnson and Cionea find that in most cases, arguments on Twitter are brief and superficial. Users tend to withdraw from online exchanges rather than engage in in-depth conversations. The final section of this book presents three chapters that look at how humor and popular culture, that is, the ‘banal’ referenced above, form drivers of political conversations on Twitter. Roberta Chevrette and Christopher Duerringer present the results from a rhetorical analysis of the #BROTUS memes in Chapter 10. Their research shows that the memes, through their use of humor and affect, created space for resistance against the Trump administration, while also replicating some of its values and beliefs. In Chapter 11, Nathan Rodriguez examines the backlash generated in response to the US Department of State’s #TravelHacks campaign. His grounded theory approach reveals that the backlash led to the creation of an online counterpublic, that in spite of the extensive engagement between its members, did little more than serve as an echo chamber. Chapter 12 features Ernest Mathijs’ work into how the online feminist communities around cult horror film use cultural capital and social ties to engender social change. His research compares the larger, fluctuating communities on Twitter to the smaller online communities on Facebook in terms of the role they play in creating and maintaining social movements. In the final chapter, Chapter 13, we circle back and consider what all of this means in terms of the talk on Twitter and how this contributes to or detracts from Twitter’s ability to function as a public sphere. We delineate what the various contributions have added to extant theoretical work on the public sphere, counterpublics, affective connectivity, and role of emotions in political communication.

References Al-Tahmazi, T.  H. (2015). The pursuit of power in Iraqi political discourse: Unpacking the construction of sociopolitical communities on Facebook. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 10(2), 163–179. Arlt, D., Rauchfleisch, A., & Schäfer, M. (2019). Between fragmentation and dialogue. Twitter communities and political debate about the Swiss “Nuclear withdrawal initiative”. Environmental Communication, 13(4), 440–456. Bartlett, J. (2014). Populism, social media and democratic strain. In C. Sandelind (Ed.), European populism and winning the immigration debate (pp. 99–116). Falun: Scandbook.

16 

G. BOUVIER AND J. E. ROSENBAUM

Baumgaertner, B.  O., Tyson, R.  C., & Krone, S.  M. (2016). Opinion strength influences the spatial dynamics of opinion formation. The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 40(4), 207–218. Borgatti, S., & Foster, P.  C. (2003). The network paradigm in organizational research: A review and typology. Journal of Management, 29(6), 991–1013. Bouvier, G. (2015). What is a discourse approach to twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social media: Connecting with other academic fields. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 10(2), 149–162. Bouvier, G. (2019). How journalists source trending social media feeds: A critical discourse perspective on twitter. Journalism Studies, 20(2), 212–231. Bouvier, G. (2020, forthcoming). From ‘echo chambers’ to ‘chaos chambers’: Discursive coherence and contradiction in the #MeToo twitter feed. Critical Discourse Studies Brock, A. (2012). From the Blackhand side: Twitter as a cultural conversation. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 56(4), 529–549. Brunner, E. (2017). Wild public networks and affective movements in China: Environmental activism, social media, and protest in Maoming. Journal of Communication, 67, 665–677. Bruns, A., & Highfield, T. (2013). Political networks on twitter: Tweeting the Queensland state election. Information, Communication, & Society, 16(5), 667–691. Bruns, A., Highfield, T., & Burgess, J. (2013). The Arab spring and social media audiences: English and Arabic twitter users and their networks. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(7), 871–898. Burgess, J., Foth, M., & Klaebe, H. (2006). Everyday creativity as civic engagement: A cultural citizenship view of new media. Paper presented at the Communication Policy & Research Forum, September 25–26, Sydney, Australia. Castells, M. (2015). Networks of outrage and hope: Social movements in the internet age. London: Polity. Carney, N. (2016). All lives matter but so does race: Black lives matter and the evolving role of social media. Humanity and Society, 40(2), 180–199. Chan, M. (2018). Networked counterpublics and discursive contestation in the agonistic public sphere: Political jamming a police force Facebook page. Asian Journal of Communication, 28(6), 561–578. Colleoni, E., Rozza, A., & Arvidsson, A. (2014). Echo chamber or public sphere? Predicting political orientation and measuring political homophily in twitter using big data. Journal of Communication, 64, 317–332. Conover, M.  D., Ratkiewicz, J., Gonçales, B., Flammmini, A., & Menczer, F. (2011). Political polarization on Twitter. Proceedings of the fifth international AAAI conference on weblogs and social media.

1  COMMUNICATION IN THE AGE OF TWITTER: THE NATURE OF ONLINE… 

17

Creemers, R. (2017). Cyber China: Upgrading propaganda, public opinion work and social management for the twenty-first century. Journal of Contemporary China, 26(103), 85–100. Dahlberg, L. (2007). The internet, deliberative democracy, and power: Radicalizing the public sphere. International Journal of Media and Culture Politics, 3(1), 47–64. Dahlgren, P. (2018). Public sphere participation online: The ambiguities of affect. International Journal of Communication, 12, 2052–2070. Dawson, V.  R., & Brunner, E. (2019). Corporate social responsibility on wild public networks: Communicating to disparate and multivocal stakeholders. Management Communication Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0893318919884920. Del Valle, M. E., & Borge Bravo, R. (2018). Echo chambers in parliamentary twitter networks: The Catalan case. International Journal of Communication, 12, 1715–1735. Dutton, W.  H. (2009). The fifth estate emerging through the network of networks. Prometheus: Critical Studies in Innovation, 27(1), 1–15. Enli, G. (2015). Mediated authenticity: How the media constructs reality. New York: Peter Lang. Enli, G. (2017a). New media and politics. Annals of the International Communication Association, 41(3–4), 220–227. Enli, G. (2017b). Twitter as arena for the authentic outsider: Exploring the social media campaigns of trump and Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. European Journal of Communication, 32(1), 50–61. Enli, G., & Simonsen, C. A. (2018). ‘Social media logic’ meets professional norms: Twitter hashtags usage by journalists and politicians. Information, Communication & Society, 8, 1081–1096. Engesser, S., Ernst, N., Esser, F., & Büchel, F. (2016). Populism and social media; how politicians spread a fragmented ideology. Information, Communication & Society, 20(8), 1109–1126. Florini, S. (2019). Beyond hashtags: Racial politics and black digital networks. New York: New York University Press. Florini, S. (2014). Tweets, tweeps and signifyin’: Communication and cultural performance on ‘black twitter’. Television & New Media, 15(3), 223–237. Flynn, J. (2004). Communicative power in Habermas’s theory of democracy. European Journal of Political Theory, 3(4), 433–454. Foxman, A., & Wolf, C. (2013). Viral hate: Containing its spread on the internet. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fraser, N. (1992). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In C.  Calhoun (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere (pp. 109–142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fuchs, C. (2017). Donald Trump: A critical theory-perspective on authoritarian capitalism. TripleC, 15(1), 1–72.

18 

G. BOUVIER AND J. E. ROSENBAUM

Gentleman, A. (2011, August 11). London riots: Social media helped gangs orchestrate the looting, says MP. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www. guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/11/riots-social-media-gang-culture Gerbaudo, P. (2012). Tweets and the streets: Social media and contemporary activism. London: Pluto Press. Graham, T., Broersma, M., Hazelhoff, K., & van 't Haar, G. (2013). Between broadcasting political messages and interacting with voters: The use of twitter during the 2010 UK general election campaign. Information, Communication & Society, 16(5), 692–716. Graham, T., Jackson, D., & Broersma, M. (2016). New platforms, old habits? Candidates’ use of twitter during the 2016 British and Dutch general election campaigns. New Media & Society, 18(5), 765–783. Guerrero-Solé, F. (2018). Interactive behavior in political discussions on twitter: Politicians, media, and citizens’ patterns of interaction in the 2015 and 2016 electoral campaigns in Spain. Social Media + Society, 2018, 1–16. Guo, L., Rohde, J. A., & Wu, D. (2018). Who is responsible for Twitter’s echo chamber problem? Evidence from 2016 U.S. election networks. Information, Communication, & Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018. 1499793. Habermas, J. (1987). The theory of communicative action. Boston: Beacon Press. Habermas, J. (2006). Political communication in media society: Does democracy still enjoy an epistemic dimension? The impact of normative theory on empirical research. Communication Theory, 16, 411–426. Hall Jamieson, K., & Cappella, J. N. (2008). Echo chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the conservative media establishment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heikkilä, N. (2017). Online antagonism of the alt-right in the 2016 election. European Journal of American Studies, 12(2), 1–22. Hermida, A., Lewis, S. C., & Zamith, R. (2014). Sourcing the Arab spring: A case study of Andy Carvin’s sources on twitter during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(3), 479–499. Huey, L. (2015). This is not your mother’s terrorism: Social media, online radicalization, and the practice of political jamming. Journal of Terrorism Research, 6(2), 1–16. Himelboim, I., Sweetser, K.  D., Tinkham, S.  F., Cameron, K., Danelo, M., & West, K. (2016). Valence-based homophily on twitter: Network analysis of emotions and political talk in the 2012 presidential election. New Media & Society, 18(7), 1382–1400. Horowitz, L. S. (2013). Toward empathic agonism: Conflicting vulnerabilities in urban wetland governance. Environment and Planning, 45, 2344–2361. Jacobs, K., & Spierings, N. (2018). A populist paradise? Examining populists’ twitter adoption and use. Information, Communication & Society, 22(12), 1681–1696.

1  COMMUNICATION IN THE AGE OF TWITTER: THE NATURE OF ONLINE… 

19

Jackson, S.  J., Bailey, M., & Foucault Welles, B. (2020). #HashtagActivism: Networks of race and gender justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackson, S. J., & Banaszczyk, S. (2016). Digital standpoints: Debating gendered violence and racial exclusions in the feminist counterpublic. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 40(4), 391–407. Jackson, S. J., & Foucault Welles, B. (2015). Hijacking #MyNYPD: Social media dissent and networked counterpublics. Journal of Communication, 65, 932–952. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12185. Jansen, F. (2010). Digital activism in the Middle East: Mapping issues networks in Egypt, Iran, Syria and Tunisia. Knowledge Management for Development Journal, 6(1), 37–52. Kane, G. C., Alavi, M., Labianca, G. J., & Borgatti, S. P. (2014). What’s different about social media networks: A framework and research agenda. MIS Quarterly, 38(1), 274–304. Karpf, D. (2010). Online political mobilization from the advocacy’s group perspective: Looking beyond clicktivism. Policy & Internet, 2(4), 7–41. Kim, J., & Kim, E. J. (2008). Theorizing dialogic deliberation: Everyday political talk as communicative action and dialogue. Communication Theory, 18, 51–70. Klein, A. (2019). From twitter to Charlottesville: Analyzing the fighting words between the alt-right and Antifa. International Journal of Communication, 13, 297–318. Kreiss, D. (2016). Seizing the moment: The presidential campaigns’ use of twitter during the 2012 electoral cycle. New Media & Society, 18, 1473–1490. Kruse, L. M., Norris, D. R., & Flinchum, J. R. (2018). Social media as a public sphere? Politics on social media. The Sociological Quarterly, 59(1), 62–84. Krzyěanowski, M., & Ledin, P. (2017). Uncivility on the web: Populism in/and the borderline discourses of exclusion. Journal of Language and Politics, 16(4), 566–581. Kuo, R. (2018). Racial justice activist hashtags: Counterpublics and discourse circulation. New Media & Society, 20(2), 495–515. Larsson, A. O., & Ihlen, Ø. (2015). Birds of a feather flock together? Party leaders on twitter during the 2013 Norwegian elections. European Journal of Communication, 30, 666–681. Lilliker, D. G., & Jackson, N. (2010). Towards a more participatory style of election campaigning: The impact of web 2.0 on the UK 2010 general election. Policy & Internet, 3(4), 71–98. MacKinnon, R. (2011). Liberation technology: China’s “networked authoritarianism”. Journal of Democracy, 22(2), 32–46. McGuian, J. (2005). The cultural public sphere. European Journal of Culture Studies, 8, 427–443. Morozov, E. (2011). The net delusion: How not to liberate the world. London: Penguin.

20 

G. BOUVIER AND J. E. ROSENBAUM

Mouffe, C. (1999). Deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism? Social Research, 66(3), 745–758. Mouffe, C. (2000). Deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism. Political Science Series, 72, 1–17. Müller, F., & Hermes, J. (2010). The performance of cultural citizenship: Audiences and the politics of multicultural television drama. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 27(2), 193–208. Neumayer, C., & Valtysson, B. (2013). Tweet against Nazis? Twitter, power, and networked publics in anti-fascist protests. MedieKultur, 29(55), 3–20. Ott, B. L. (2017). The age of twitter: Donald J. trump and the politics of debasement. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 34(1), 59–68. Page, R. (2012). The linguistics of self-branding and micro-celebrity in twitter: The role of hashtags. Discourse & Communication, 6(2), 181–201. Papacharissi, Z. (2016). Affective publics and structure of storytelling: Sentiment, events and mediality. Information, Communication and Society, 19(3), 307–324. Papacharissi, Z. (2014). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paparachissi, Z. (2009). The virtual sphere 2.0: The internet, the public sphere, and beyond. In A. Chadwick & P. N. Howard (Eds.), Routledge handbook of internet politics (pp. 230–245). New York: Routledge. Papacharissi, Z., & de Fatima Oliveira, M. (2012). Affective news and networked publics: The rhythms of news storytelling on #Egypt. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 266–282. Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the internet is hiding from you. London: Penguin. Penney, J., & Dadas, C. (2013). (Re)tweeting in the service of protest: Digital composition and circulation in the Occupy Wall street movement. New Media & Society, 16(1), 74–90. Pew Research Center. (2018, July 10). Eight-in-ten Blacks say social media shed light on rarely discussed issues; the same share of whites say these issues distract from important issues. Pew Research Center.. Retrieved from https://www. pewresearch.org/internet/2018/07/11/public-attitudes-toward-politicalengagement-on-social-media/pi_2018-07-10_social-activism_0-20/ Poell, T., & Borra, E. (2012). Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr as platforms of alternative journalism: The social media account of the 2010 Toronto G20 protests. Journalism, 13(6), 695–713. Poell, T., & van Dijck, J. (2015). Social media and activist communication. In C. Atton (Ed.), The Routledge companion to alternative and community media (pp. 527–537). London: Routledge. Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York: Penguin Books.

1  COMMUNICATION IN THE AGE OF TWITTER: THE NATURE OF ONLINE… 

21

Rane, H., & Salem, S. (2012). Social media, social movements, and the diffusion of ideas in the Arab uprisings. Journal of International Communication, 18(1), 97–111. Rambukkana, N. (2015a). Hashtags as technosocial events. In N.  Rambukkana (Ed.), Hashtag publics: The power and politics of discursive networks (pp. 1–10). New York: Peter Lang. Rambukkana, N. (2015b). From #RaceFail to #Ferguson: The digital intimacies of race-activist hashtag publics. The Fibreculture Journal, 26, 159–188. Ronzhyn, A. (2014). The use of Facebook and twitter during the 2013–2014 protests in Ukraine. In A. Rospigliosi (Ed.), Proceedings of the European conference on social media: ECSM 2014 (pp. 442–449). Curran Associates. Rosenbaum, J. E. (2018). Constructing digital cultures: Tweets, trends, race, and gender. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Schofield Clark, L. (2016). Participants on the margins: #BlackLivesMatter and the role that shared artifacts of engagement played among minoritized political newcomers on snapchat, Facebook, and twitter. International Journal of Communication, 10, 235–253. Siapera, E., Hunt, G., & Lynn, T. (2015). #Gazaunderattack: Twitter, Palestine and diffused war. Information, Communication & Society, 18, 1297–1319. Sills, S., Pickens, C., Beach, K., Jones, L., Calder-Dawe, O., Benton-Greig, P., & Gavey, N. (2016). Rape culture and social media: Young critics and a feminist counterpublic. Feminist Media Studies, 16(6), 935–951. Stieglitz, S., & Dang-Xuan, L. (2013). Emotions and information diffusion in social media—Sentiment of microblogs and sharing behavior. Journal of Management Information Systems, 29(4), 217–247. Theocharis, Y., Barberá, P., Fazekas, Z., Popa, S. A., & Parnet, O. (2016). A bad workman blames his tweets: The consequences of citizens’ uncivil twitter use when interacting with party candidates. Journal of Communication, 66, 1007–1031. Tromble, R. (2018). Thanks for (actually) responding! How citizens’ demand shapes politicians’ interactive practices on twitter. New Media & Society, 20(2), 676–697. Tufekci, Z. (2017). Twitter and tear gas: The power and fragility of networked protest. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Van Laer, J., & Van Aelst, P. (2010). Internet and social movement action repertoires. Opportunities and limitations. Information, Communication & Society, 13(8), 1146–1171. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2018). The emotional architecture of social media. In Z.  Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self and platforms, stories, connections (pp. 77–93). New York: Routledge.

22 

G. BOUVIER AND J. E. ROSENBAUM

Wang, C., Zhou, Z., Jin, X.-L., Fang, Y., & Lee, M. O. (2017). The influence of affective cues on positive emotion in predicting instant information sharing on microblogs: Gender as a moderator. Information Processing and Management, 53(3), 721–734. Yang, G. (2014). Internet activism and the party-state in China. Daedalus, 143(2), 110–123. Zuiderveen Borgesius, F. J., Trilling, D., Möller, J., Bodó, B., de Vreese, C., & Helberger, N. (2016). Should we worry about filter bubbles? Internet Policy Review, 5(1), 1–15.

PART I

Political Contention and Civic Engagement

CHAPTER 2

Going “Rogue”: National Parks, Discourses of American Identity and Resistance on Twitter Joanne Marras Tate, Vincent Russell, Rachel Larsen, and Ellie Busch

Introduction Shortly after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, his administration directed several federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service (NPS), to limit contact with the public (Davis, 2017; Perez, 2017). In defiance, the Badlands National Park official Twitter account issued a series of tweets on January 24, 2017 about climate change that quickly went viral. The tweets were later deleted, and the public acknowledged this action as censorship of discussions about

J. Marras Tate (*) • V. Russell • R. Larsen • E. Busch Department of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Bouvier, J. E. Rosenbaum (eds.), Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41421-4_2

25

26 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

climate change by the new administration (Diaz, 2017). By January 26, 2017, less than a week after the inauguration, more than ten “rogue” national park Twitter accounts (including @AltUSNatParkService, @ BadHombreNPS, and @AltYellowStone) sprung up in response to this censorship (Noe, 2017). In this paper, we argue that these alternative or rogue national park Twitter accounts functioned as a digital site of discursive resistance to the Trump administration’s communication agenda. We discuss how three accounts that were covertly created and managed by National Park government employees drew on discourses of US national identity to construct identities of resistance, while situating themselves within larger historical discourses of national parks and American symbolism. National parks are an important signifier of national identity (Burns, 2009; Runte, 2010; Tyrrell, 2012) and as such constitute a significant component of the nationalistic rhetoric associated with place-myths (Rennie, 2006; Runte, 2010). Hence, we begin this chapter with a historical overview of the NPS, wherein we discuss how parks have embodied democratic ideals (Frome, 2015; Ross-Bryant, 2005; Runte, 2010). Next, we present the findings from our Critical Discourse Analysis into what has, in some places, become a part of the everydayness of talk (Tracy & Robles, 2013): the practice of tweeting. We identify how rogue National Park Twitter accounts evoked nationalism, resisted government, and strove to uphold democratic values. Our research centers on the rogue national park Twitter accounts, as they became an exemplar of how tweets have become part of the process through which social values are constructed. Moreover, these accounts serve as a case study for examining civic participation on Twitter, allowing us to investigate how Twitter works as a public communicative space that encourages public engagement through a networked public sphere (Ausserhofer & Maireder, 2013; Chen, Tu, & Zheng, 2017). Conducting an analysis of discourses created by these rogue accounts is a way to further understand how this networked public sphere helps shape the meanings associated with the US national parks, providing an in-depth understanding of the nature of the US national identity constructed on Twitter. This investigation provides insight into how these constructs circulate and evolve on Twitter, allowing for the examination of Twitter’s potential as a public sphere.

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

27

Foucault and Identity Construction This chapter, with its focus on the ways in which rogue accounts construct American identity through the use of historical symbols, relies on Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972). Foucault provides a framework that allows us to understand how the selected rogue Twitter accounts socially construct the national parks’ symbolic identity within significant historical contexts, with the idea of the “document” (p. 6) used here to describe history construction in the form of tweeting as a historical discourse. Because Foucault emphasizes examining nondominant discourses as a way to bring them to the forefront, we use Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to investigate discourses happening on a platform that, although public, does not always align with mainstream societal discourse. CDA enables us to highlight societal struggles and gaps in values by assessing “what exists, what might exist and what should exist” (Fairclough, 2013, p. 7). CDA connects to the idea of archaeology as well by serving as a means to investigate the general histories present in the discourses created to represent the national parks, which are embedded within its constructed nationalistic history. Foucault (1972) points out that: “[This] history in its traditional form, undertook to ‘memorize’ the monuments of the past, transform them into documents, and lend speech to those traces which, in themselves, are often not verbal, or which say in silence something other than what they actually say; in our time, history is that which transforms documents into monuments.” (p. 7, emphasis added)

In a similar manner, the digital platform of Twitter works to bring historical significance to the US NPS by allowing for the creation of these rogue Twitter accounts and hosting the subsequent discourse constructed on Twitter. The Twitter platform is a unique, dynamic document that works to change and uphold the historical stories of the NPS. In examining nondominant discourses, Foucault (1972) argues that a discursively oriented methodology “makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same” (p. 21) and “to master time through a perpetually reversible relation between an origin and a term that are never given, but are always at work” (p. 22). Discursive practices showcased as alternative enact, through language, the various power struggles at play. The sociopolitical context of the tweets makes these struggles

28 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

visible, while still holding on to notions of US national identity and their social construction. Through the identity-work employed by the rogue accounts, we emphasize that “talk does identity-work [and] identities shape talk” (Tracy & Robles, 2013, p. 7), and show that the Twitter accounts under analysis use their association with the national parks to construct American national identity, while simultaneously using the symbol of the national parks to construct a discourse of resistance. We emphasize that identity constructed through symbols is imbued with expected ways of being, which work in a dissenting and assenting way toward the construction of national identity. In other words, the use of national symbols, like those associated with the NPS, have the ability to uphold existing identities, enforcing an existing and familiar identity, while also having the ability to use those symbols as a strategy to enact resistance. Resistance, then, works as an identity-builder of the NPS, being discursively engaged in order to maintain historical notions and collective identities (Milan, 2015). In the remainder of this chapter, we review literature on digital activism and provide a CDA of tweets by three “alternative” or rogue national park Twitter accounts in the weeks following their creation. We conclude that the rogue NPS Twitter accounts represent an emergent discursive rupture about governmental censorship on online platforms functioning as networked public spheres. The accounts sought to reclaim the historical mission of the parks as advocates for democratic values of public access, transparency, and justice—all while constructing US national identity through concepts of wilderness.

The National Park Imaginary and US Identity To situate the history(ies) of US national parks, we point to Foucault’s (1972) framework of history as a “discontinuity” that “enables the historian to individualize different domains but can be established only by comparing those domains” (p. 9). This brief history of the national parks strives to problematize patriotic assumptions about the parks’ founding and use. The concept of discontinuity informs this project’s deconstruction of history by emphasizing the relationship between power and history and attempting to disrupt existing power relations by acknowledging multiple histories. Historical discontinuity provides a means to understand how national parks serve an important function in the US imaginary (Howkins, Orsi, & Fiege, 2016), for national identity continues

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

29

inexorably to be tied to landscapes and romantic narratives (DeLuca & Demo, 2000; Frome, 2015). We will thus compare various historical domains to discontinue ongoing discourses about the importance of public lands for US national identity. In the United States, public lands have always been closely tied to modern notions of American national identity. Modern American civilization, according to Nash (2014), was based on ideals of wilderness, in which “vast, largely unmodified regions would be very close to absolute wilderness” (p. 7), with national parks functioning as a symbol for national identification, institutionalized through the history of public lands and later through the creation of the NPS (Nash, 2014). The US idea of public lands was shaped by several events before it was concretized into the creation of the NPS. Thomas Jefferson’s writings from the late 1700s were key in the process of creating the national parks. He described the land as unique to the United States (Runte, 2010; Tyrrell, 2012), while in the middle of the eighteenth century Henry David Thoreau (1990) inspired ideals of life and spiritual meaning to living with nature, further consolidating ideals of wilderness with the American landscape and the identity bound to it. Despite the inclusive rhetoric of these early national park advocates, the imaginary of the US wilderness was directed primarily to upper-class white people (DeLuca, 2010), who determined and constructed ideals of who could have access and the ways in which natural spaces should be enjoyed (Finney, 2014). Later events that shaped American wilderness imagery included the critique of the commercialization and distribution of property ownership at Niagara Falls, an event that contradicted the dominant American values of landscape democracy and equal access, and showed how most people valued the enjoyment of a pristine location over its capital exploitation (Runte, 2010). These developments revealed how the construction of a national symbol such as the wilderness spaces that later became the NPS was paramount for the United States in a moment when separating identities from Europe was perceived as an essential step toward the development of distinctions between people, architecture, and landscapes (Runte, 2010; Tyrrell, 2012). The US national imaginary has always relied on images and discourses that maintained the idea of public lands. This included paintings such as Albert Bierstadt’s 1863, The Rocky Mountain, Lander’s Peak, which demonstrates the process by which popular media of the time were able to broadcast the grandeur of the West, thereby supporting the reputation of

30 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

a stunning American scenery (Runte, 2010). These discourses culminated in 1864 when Abraham Lincoln established Yosemite Park, and later in 1906 with Theodore Roosevelt’s establishment of Yellowstone National Park and the establishment of the NPS in 1916 (Brinkley, 2009). Most recently, the use of imagery to define and maintain US identity is seen in National Parks: America’s Best Idea (Dir. Ken Burns, 2009). This is a documentary series that leads the viewer on a journey into the world of National Parks and their historical roots. This documentary series showcases selective narratives, where wilderness is reduced but survives within the ideals upheld by upper-class white people about what National Parks are (DeLuca, 2010)—and with it—their ideals of US identity (Nash, 2014). National parks are thus seen as a legacy to US heritage and customs, where the romanticized narratives of the Wild West, the conquering of Native Americans, as well as the figure of the pioneer and the idea of a pristine wilderness, continue to exist (DeLuca & Demo, 2000). These narratives were present almost immediately upon the creation of the NPS: DeLuca’s and Demo’s (2000) analysis of Carleton Watkins’ early photographs of Yosemite demonstrates how these images constructed the national myth of pristine nature. This was a myth made material in the “pristine paradise,” while at the same time it marginalized other cultures’ visions of nature and human–nature relations, particularly that of Native Americans. According to DeLuca and Demo (2000), the construction of pristine wilderness as a production was evident and aided the “socially constructed ideas in the United States” such as preservation of the “wild” and conservation as a product of American experiences (Tyrrell, 2012, p. 1).

Twitter Activism and the National Park Service The rogue national park Twitter accounts created after the 2017 determination for limiting of communication by government agencies and departments serve as a reminder of the potential of social media as a form of resistance. Using social media to resist the government is nothing new: Twitter has been used for active resistance in many other cases. In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring, in many senses, showcased how social media can be a tool for aggregating resistance, and how new technologies were said to have “a key role in the organization and diffusion of protest” (Tudoroiu, 2014, p.  346). As Tindall and Robinson (2017) explain, even though social networks have been

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

31

statistical predictors of public participation, they do not operate in isolation. Essentially, social networks are facilitators of social processes. Social media and new technologies, therefore, are less about creating new forms of advocacy and activism and instead facilitate already “established modes of collective action” (Stoddart & Macdonald, 2011, p. 329). Literature points to the specific contributions of social media as a space for political advocacy, activism, and other forms of resistance. Obar (2014) notes how social media technology offers ways of communicating that are different from offline modes and traditional forms of computer-mediated communication (p. 212), exemplified by the rogue NPS accounts’ resistance and advocacy. Social media, like Twitter, continue to serve as platforms for activism and discursive resistance in order to uphold “democratic agency beyond traditional means of civic participation” (Milan, 2017, p. 2). Milan (2016) notes that such platforms are a means to expose contradictions encountered within the system, as they encourage public participation as well as engagement in critical thinking. As Shirky (2008) indicates, the advent of new technology has provided people with an increased ability to collaborate and engage in collective action, outside of established institutions and frameworks. Indeed, social media activism provides unique affordances and offers the potential to reach wider audiences and engage in activism from remote locations. Twitter use by different members of the public sphere has made it a platform that is part of a networked sphere, where issues of political stance are openly negotiated (Ausserhofer & Maireder, 2013). In addition, research suggests that there is a positive association between “being exposed to online information and political participation” (Scherman, Arriagada, & Valenzuela, 2015, p. 153). Thus, social media opens up a space for the potential increase of political engagement by individuals. In the case of the rogue accounts, it opened up a space for engagement with public opinion, open critique of government officials and institutions, as well as the ability to share governmental information about the national parks, which also relied on notions of collective US national identity. Notions of collective identity are often understood as either a “necessary condition for mobilization to occur” or as “an important outcome of social movement processes” (p. 11). Tindall and Robinson (2017) showed how these notions have an important relationship to one’s participation in ongoing activism as well as with one’s social media network

32 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

embeddedness. Social media platforms, by providing a space for engaged participation on social issues, whether motivated by advocacy groups or more general social movements, allow for the mobilization of collective identity through their network capabilities. The rogue accounts allowed for this kind of mobilization by opening up a space for different American identities to unify under one denominator: national parks (Spillman, 2017; Wes, 2017).

National Identity in Connection to Land on Twitter Tracy and Robles’s Everyday Talk (2013) delves into how people infer different meanings about particular discourses and utterances in order to make sense of a conversation, and of themselves. The ordinary moments of daily conversation reflect, sustain, build, and challenge people’s identities. According to Tracy and Robles (2013), identity encompasses the most personal aspects, personalities, and attitudes. A national identity tends to be identified by the “ways in which the citizens of a country talk about what defines them as a country” (Hahn, Judd, & Park, 2010, p. 124). Geographic constraints and proximity can contribute to the development of group identity, especially when deemed essential to the group’s security and vitality (Herb & Kaplan, 1999). The actual space, particular terrain, location, historic legacy, as well as unique natural features help establish such identification (Herb & Kaplan, 1999). National parks are an example of how such associations of land and wilderness formed a foundation for the United States as a country, with wilderness discourses serving nationalistic exigencies (DeLuca & Demo, 2001). In addition to shared histories and beliefs of freedom, people connect with the land through the social constructions established by the nation-state, including the ideal of American land embodying the American nation (Burns, 2009). This ideal can be observed in the citizenship rights established in the US Constitution: anyone born on American soil is guaranteed citizenship (Hahn et  al., 2010). National parks functioned as a culturally significant foundation that were—and are—disseminated through media productions and everyday talk. Herb and Kaplan (1999) state that foundations may solidify identities because “only territory provides tangible evidence of the nation’s existence and its historical roots” (p. 10). The national parks enhanced the ‘wilderness’ narratives and discourse, with, for example, Yosemite’s valley

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

33

offering cultural legitimacy to a nation seeking heritage (DeLuca & Demo, 2001). Social media today is one of the ways in which citizens can engage in political communication in the public sphere (Ausserhofer & Maireder, 2013). According to Milan (2015), social media has a role in activists’ meaning construction processes and in the “circulation of meaning” (Milan, 2015, p. 890), by significantly contributing to “structure modes of interactions and relationships” where a collective identity allows users to recognize themselves in a collective “we” (Milan, 2015, p. 891). National parks, as land and therefore a concrete object, are reflected on Twitter through the use of images and discourse practices that digitally mediate American identity as a collective within the platform (Milan, 2015). In particular, collective identity through the processes of interaction and sharing is amplified by social media’s capabilities (Milan, 2015). Identity-work, the discursive process through which identities are made available to participants and observers, is a way of conceptualizing the ways Twitter users co-construct the American symbol of national parks. We focus on how historical images and discourse help shape identities on Twitter’s networked sphere by questioning how political discourse strategies used by the national parks’ rogue Twitter accounts are constructed, and how the content of their tweets reflects and shapes an American identity.

Methods We rely on theoretical and methodological frameworks from an array of scholars. The approach we take to analyzing how people talk about national parks as a US symbol on Twitter is through CDA. We turn to Foucault (1972) to observe how discourse is based on social identities and how it functions rhetorically. Tracy and Robles’ (2013) concept of identity-work is used to focus on how everyday talk constructs identities, as well as Foucault’s (1972) notion of discursive formation as “the principle of dispersion and redistribution, not of formulations, not of sentences, not of propositions, but of statements” (p. 107), which are conceptualized in history. Such statements, or rules that make a statement meaningful, operate within defined systems and conceptual possibilities that are based on particular time periods in which they are occurring. CDA has the potential to reveal the struggle against social and political inequality within exchanges, while also allowing for the identification of

34 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

emergent discourse practices (Fairclough, 2013). In particular, we focused on conducting a positive critique, where the analysis focused on “how people seek to remedy or mitigate” social wrongs (Fairclough, 2013, p.  7). With this orientation, various discourses were brought together through the understanding of struggles, where alternative discourses emerged as strategies of resistance against dominant, historical discourses. The above-mentioned authors direct how we analyze various Twitter accounts and the content within their tweets, as pertaining to threat, censorship, and identity building regarding America’s national parks. In addition, we consider the ways in which culturally specific discursive moves are meaningful and reflect the cultural values of the discursive actors themselves. Further, our analysis focuses on the use of socially significant rhetorical statements that construct ideals of identity and struggle. We analyzed three accounts that were verified by Snopes as operated by NPS employees (Binkowski, 2017) and that had the most followers: @ AltMountRainier, @BadHombreNPS, @AltYelloNatPark. Snopes-­ approved accounts were chosen because anyone can create a Twitter account and name it with a “national park” in its name. Snopes, one of the largest fact-checking sites (Graves, 2016), had identified accounts that were created and managed by national park government employees. All three accounts were created between January 24 and January 26, 2017. We collected tweets posted by these accounts from January 24th, 2017 until February 15th, 2017. These dates were selected because the rogue NPS Twitter accounts received most media coverage and public attention during this time, as they defied government and its policy. Tweets were identified by using Twitter’s advanced search engines, in which we plotted the desired dates and account handles. The 469 tweets that were collected were all publicly available. In addition, the accounts and their tweets received a great deal of public attention in various news media outlets both in and outside the United States, effectively minimizing ethical concerns surrounding the identification of the authors. As a research team, we analyzed the data set individually and later discussed our observations and findings collectively, guided by the following research question: How do alternative/rogue national park Twitter accounts draw on historic discourses of American nationalism to construct an American identity? Through our collective discussion, we made sense of the ways in which these accounts were addressing different political issues, engaging citizens and Twitter followers, and promoting their

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

35

profile. We also identified what other strategies the accounts employed that relied on different American ways of being as well as constructing American national identity.

Findings All accounts under investigation relied heavily on discourses based on the historical conceptualization of national parks. In particular, discourses were related to the nationalistic and presidential ideals ingrained in the conception of the parks, including historic figures and pristine images of wilderness. Such discourses were based on meanings that have been historically used and are central to the public conception of what a national park may stand for, particularly related to wilderness (Nash, 2014). Drawing on these different tropes allowed the tweets to construct a new identity for the parks—as sites of discursive resistance and democracy, in which US national identity is built on the resistance of censorship. Such discourses used particular discursive formations based on newly generated meanings attributed to doing counteractive tweeting. We conceptualize counteractive tweeting as a communication practice that challenges the status quo and institutional censorship. The key to counteractive tweeting comes from self-framing, as well as the type of discourse in which the account/tweet is engaging with to exert mitigation or change. We identified several discourse strategies used by the rogue accounts, which performed identity work. Such strategies were seen across the different accounts, with some tweets simultaneously drawing on multiple strategies. The three discourse strategies used in the effort to reclaim the National Parks’ historic mission included: evoking nationalism, upholding democratic values, and resisting the government. These are described below. Evoking Nationalism Based on our review of the physical national parks and our analysis of the different rogue accounts, we identified ways in which these accounts evoke nationalism as a discursive strategy to establish a shared sense of identity. On February 9th, 2017, @AltYelloNatPark tweeted “The Upper Geyser Bassin [sic] is dominated by tough crystalline Silicate called Geyserite which allows pressure to build and geysers to form,” alongside the tweet a photo of the geyser (Fig. 2.1), where the invocation of pristineness and wildness, through the lens of a photographic composition, highlights important notions of American landscapes as considered in the section on

36 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

Fig. 2.1  Tweet shared by @AltYelloNatPark account on February 9th, 2017. “Yellowstone Geyser Rainbow,” photo credit: Larry Gerbrandt. https://www. flickr.com/photos/larrygerbrandt/292124275. All rights reserved

national parks above. Similarly, @BadHombreNPS tweeted on January 31st, that “The Badlands erode at the rapid rate of about one inch per year, which is nothing compared to the current rate of erosion in our government.” This was accompanied by a photograph of the park with the Black Hills in the background, highlighting the connection between land, government, and the American public.1 The @BadHombreNPS account released the following tweet on February 1st, 2017 (Fig. 2.2) “Protecting our #wilderness should never be a partisan issue. It’s our world and it deserves our protection. #resist.” This tweet was a comment added to a retweet by @WildernessSociety: “One issue that unites voters across the West: Let’s protect & preserve our 1

 See tweet here: https://tinyurl.com/badhombrebadlands

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

37

Fig. 2.2  Tweet shared by @BadHombreNPS account on February 1st, 2017. “Tilted ice, rosy sunrise,” photo credit: Steven Bratman. https://www.flickr.com/ photos/darkdenver/6971654379. Some rights reserved

public lands on.rgj.com/2kSQQ8l via @ByBenSpillman #OurWild.” The original tweet from @WildernessSociety included an image from Rocky Mountain National Park. A snowy pristine landscape with mountains and smooth sunlight was showcased, showing pine trees covered with snow that reflected the natural colors and remoteness of the landscape of the American park. The fact that this is a retweet is important to our analysis because of the connection and construction of a narrative in which the landscape represents both voting sides of the political spectrum. The link posted by @WildernessSociety redirects the user to an article called “UPDATED Poll: Trump and non-Trump voters agree on public lands,” published by the Reno Gazette Journal. The American West’s identity, accordingly, is not based on voter partisanship, but rather on what is shared across American identity: the preservation of the American scenery via the National Parks.

38 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

This connection to preservation, we found, is maintained through the use of images and names of historical figures. On February 1st, 2017 @ BadHombreNPS tweeted “Another morning #wilderness thought by John Muir. Wake up and smell the #resistance.” This was accompanied by an image of John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt with the quote “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity… John Muir” (Fig. 2.3). The tweet refers to a nostalgic past in which presidents and environmentalists worked together, by evoking both Roosevelt and Muir within the same tweet. Similar sentiments are expressed in other tweets, such as this tweet posted on January 29th, by @AltYelloNatPark: “In solidarity with everyone who loves the parks. AltYellowNatPark is dedicated to the preservation of our wildlands.” This is accompanied by an image of Theodore Roosevelt in front of the American flag with the

Fig. 2.3  Tweet shared by @BadHombreNPS account on February 1st, 2017. “Roosevelt and Muir at Glacier Point,” National Park Services. https://www.nps. gov/media/photo/gallery-item.htm?pg=0&id=B15B62A7-155D-4519-3EF744 2B3F6E7AF8&gid=B17BC4E5-155D-4519-3EC6B73FCE2806A8. Public domain

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

39

quote: “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official – Theodore Roosevelt.”2 The images used in such tweets lead us back to constructions established at the time of the inception of the NPS (Runte, 2010), referencing ideals of preservation that are tied to nationalistic notions (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018). This particular discursive strategy is observed throughout the tweets posted by the different rogue accounts. As part of such a strategy, different themes of nationalism were observed through references to wilderness, invocation of the past, and representations of American landscape and fauna. We discuss each of these themes below. Wilderness  The rogue national parks accounts rely on previous notions and perceptions of American identity through the use of images of landscapes specific to each national park, as observed in the tweet above from @AltYellowNatPark. In the past, images inspired comparisons between the American scenery and European art and architecture (Runte, 2010). Such images ran parallel to ideals of the American Wild West and the concept of wilderness as a unifying aspect of American identity (Nash, 2014). The continuous use of this historical strategy strengthens different claims made by the accounts that American landscapes and their preservation are a unifying factor. The use of wilderness photography and the depiction of pristine nature allow tweets to rely on discourses that have continued to construct the United States through depictions in paintings and photography (i.e. Bierstadt 1863 The Rocky Mountain, and Ansel Adams’ 1960 Moon over Half Dome). Moreover, the discourse of pristine lands and preservation through images is continuously used by many American environmentalists and personalities (DeLuca & Demo, 2000). This discourse strategy has been used in the past to establish an identity connected to place, specifically in relation to a landscape that is different from European scenery (Runte, 2010). It was also used to connect ideals of democracy instilled in the foundation of national parks (Tyrrell, 2012) and heritage unique to the US identity (Nash, 2014). From this point of view, the tweeted images perpetuate these notions and call attention to governmental actions that may disrupt or destroy such places of

 See tweet here: https://tinyurl.com/rooseveltonpatriotism

2

40 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

attachment, where community sentiment and identity are bonded (Altman & Low, 1992). Invoking the Past  The use of figures such as John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, including the iconic photo taken at the top of Glacier Point in 1903 (Fig. 2.3), arguably elicit nostalgia to an American identity that does not appear to be recognized by the Trump administration. This nostalgia is based on the historical reputation of Roosevelt who continuously advocated wilderness preservation (Pezzullo & Cox, 2018) and is placed in contrast to the Trump administration’s actions that are presented as negative to the environment, as highlighted in this tweet, also mentioned above: “The Badlands erode at the rapid rate of about one inch per year, which is nothing compared to the current rate of erosion in our government” @BadHombreNPS.  In contrast, the January 25th tweet by @ AltYelloNatPark discussed above makes a reference to Roosevelt’s quote: “Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official.” This strategically places government in a position—at the forefront of the flag—of protector of the environment as a form of patriotic value. Other figures, such as John Muir, appear in this image in order to convey ‘wilderness thoughts’ about the American landscape. By continuously referencing presidential figures that were influential within the preservation movement, and especially those who were involved in the creation of national parks, a link is made to the idea that nationalism, and not environmentalism per se, was behind the creation of the national parks (Tyrrell, 2012). The use of wilderness discourses draws attention to the kinds of identities that place national parks as the “highest incarnation of American attitudes on nature” (Tyrrell, 2012, p. 1), representing the goodness within people and wilderness (Thoreau, 1990). Theodore Roosevelt is often cited and featured in tweets by the actual national parks’ accounts, as well as in tweets by the rogue national parks’ profiles. This practice centers on the concept of public access to lands as “America’s best idea” (Burns, 2009), and is something that has been done across different media productions, including books (e.g. The Wilderness Warrior, Douglas Brinkley) and documentaries (e.g. Theodore Roosevelt: The Early Years, Ken Burns; John Muir in the New World, Catherine Tatge). This keeps historical figures present in the public’s consciousness. Evoking past presidents also highlights the nineteenth-century

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

41

nationalistic endeavor (Nash, 2014) that was part of this idea and included the American belief in saving beautiful landscapes. Consequently, this sees the land as “inspirational” (Runte, 2010). US identity, in this sense, is continuously tied to romantic narratives ingrained in the public consciousness about Native Americans, the pioneers, and the Wild West. These have influenced the relationships between humans and nature, as well as between people and the nation both in the past as well as today (Schwartz, 2006). This discourse of a nostalgic past continues to serve nationalistic exigencies that aim to orient the perception of the landscape as an American cultural icon and imbue the American narrative with discourses of wilderness (DeLuca & Demo, 2001). The tweets by the rogue accounts that reference a sense of pristine landscapes relay the nostalgic sense of an untouched and preserved place. Ultimately, the national parks’ importance as signifiers of nationalistic identity, as constructed symbol, provides a desirable clarity of meaning for the dissemination of nationalistic rhetoric (Rennie, 2006). American Landscapes and Fauna Landscapes were but one aspect of nature that was explored by the rogue accounts when evoking nationalism. The accounts also heavily used the depiction of local fauna. Moreover, within the use of this strategy, the accounts engaged in satire and personification of the nonhuman. Animal posts by the rogue accounts referenced nationalist notions associated with the bald eagle and other species typically used as symbols of National Parks. @BadHombreNPS posted the following on February 7th: “The Western Meadowlark is the state bird of 6 states—although its yellow belly and illiteracy makes it a great presidential mascot as well” (Fig. 2.4); and on January 26th: “Prairie dogs’ tiny hands are great for digging themselves into holes. That’s a good thing for prairie dogs. Not so great for a president.”3 These tweets tag on to the current popularity of animal memes, including what has been known as ‘advice animals’ (Vickery, 2014; Shifman, 2013). The particular ‘advice animals’ meme genre tends to use macro images, and “build[s] on a set of stock characters that represent stereotypical behaviors” (Shifman, 2013, p. 112).

3

 See tweet here: https://tinyurl.com/badhombreprairiedog

42 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

Fig. 2.4  Tweet shared by @BadHombreNPS account on February 7th, 2017. “Western Meadowlark,” photo credit: Rick Bohn. Author: USFWS Mountain-­ Prairie. https://www.flickr.com/photos/usfwsmtnprairie/25404358384/. Some rights reserved

The tweet posted on January 27th by @BadHombreNPS was used to evoke nationalistic ideals alongside political satire: “The Bald Eagle, along with the rest of the free world, is now at risk of being wiped out by the noxious irritant known as DJT” (Fig. 2.5). The bald eagle, part of the seal of the United States, is used as a symbol that embodies particular American values associated with the democratic “free world.” The bald eagle was adopted as a national totem in 1782, and it has played a prominent role in American iconography and folk art, being a “flaglike declaration of statefulness” (Zelinsky, 1984, p.  286). Using DJT (Donald J.  Trump) as a play on DDT constructs the president as

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

43

Fig. 2.5  Tweet shared by @BadHombreNPS account on January 27th, 2017. “Raptor,” photo credit: Jean Beaufort. https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/ es/view-image.php?image=232818&picture=raptor. Some rights reserved

antienvironment by portraying notions of an environmental struggle against toxic chemicals (Carson, 2002). The use of satire through locally significant fauna and landscapes is seen in different tweets. @AltMountRainier posted in January 27th: “Hey, #Trump! When you mount me, make sure you use the easiest #ice/#rock climb, Disappointment Cleaver, It’s the easiest way to the top (mountainemoji)” (Fig.  2.6), showcasing the use of landscapes. Essentially, tweets’ use of charismatic animals and beloved landscapes, such as the “Disappointment Cleaver,” draws on political satire to challenge the president’s position on the environment, which includes his denial of climate change and environmental policy (Kristof, 2017; Light & Hale, 2018).

44 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

Fig. 2.6  Tweet shared by @AltMtRainier account on January 27th, 2017

Upholding Democratic Values As previously discussed in this chapter, the US NPS represents more than just land dedicated to the restoration of wildness. The US national identity and the preservation of a democratic society is constructed within the ideals associated with the National Park Service. In the following tweets, the identification of “we” and calls for “everyone” to play a part in resisting the administration’s policies represent the collective unity that is claimed to be embedded within the networked public sphere of those in opposition to what is perceived as the mainstream, hegemonic discourse, and particularly the antienvironment rhetoric produced by the Trump administration. Following the censorship of the Badlands National Park Twitter account, the fear of being silenced became a very real possibility for those working for the NPS. Several tweets address this concern, such as “We are Yellowstone, and we will not be silenced,” posted by @AltYelloNatPark on January 25th, and “Everyone has a part (or parts) to play! Inaction and silence are not options anymore. #resist” shared by @BadHombreNPS on January 29th. A tweet by @altNOAA focused specifically on the silencing of media outlets: “The Senior Counselor to the President of the United States just said the media should ‘keep its mouth shut’. #resist.” This often-repeated call was seen through the use of retweets as well, as the rogue accounts called people into action and supported each other’s accounts in this endeavor. The @AltYelloNatPark account, for instance, tweeted “This is critical people, please retweet. We will not be silenced,” a reference to a tweet from @altNOAA that stated: “You can’t just sweep #ClimateChange under the rug and hope it gets away. It won’t. Demand the WH website be restored. #science #masa.” More so than references to a collective identity, the repeated mantra of “we will not be silenced” in

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

45

the above tweets and countless others from these rogue National Park accounts highlight the fear of censorship and, more broadly, NPS erasure. The “we” calls upon those who embody the American identity of sharing and having an equal say, which is something that is central to a democracy and a functioning public sphere. Silence can hold significant meanings that are subject to cultural variations and norms, participants’ interactions, and overarching community expectations (Muñoz, 2014). Within dominant American discourses, silence is often seen as negative, undesired, or harmful, connotes the negation of a person’s being, and signals that social institutions have been broken or corrupted (Carbaugh, 2005). By repeatedly stating “we will not be silenced,” the accounts drew on this “discourse of silence” to indicate that Trump’s silencing of NPS employees demonstrates the corrupt and broken nature of US political institutions. Furthermore, to silence NPS employees (who represent the parks) constituted a threat to their identity, and therefore a threat to the notion of a US identity that relies on ideals of a shared nation with pristine wilderness and environmental beauty (Nash, 2014). Hence, the accounts emphasized that everyone had a part to play in raising their voice to counteract the perceived negation of national identity perpetrated by the Trump administration. Resisting the Government Discourses of resistance were prevalent throughout the tweets analyzed for this study. They included calls to action, such as: “We must all act in whatever measure we can, no act of resistance is too small. Write, Speak, do something. Everything helps,” posted by @AltYelloNatPark on January 26th; and @BadHombreNPS’s tweet: “Signing off for the evening. Thanks to all of you for keeping the #resistance momentum alive in the name of #science and #wilderness.” Throughout their tweeting, the rogue accounts drew on a number of resistance strategies. These included retweets, engagement with other accounts and the public, as well as reaching beyond the platform when calling upon the public to contact their representatives via Faxtivism.4 Many metaphorical codes that represent activism and militarism are 4  When elected representatives would not answer phones, the accounts encouraged people to send faxes. They implemented the hashtag #faxtivism to encourage participants to act outside of the online platform.

46 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

employed in the language used, such as “fighting” and “warrior.” The rogue accounts also used activism discourse, such as “making your voices heard,” “making yourselves heard is still important,” “show up and make your voice heard.” These connect to notions central to US identity regarding the free world, freedom of speech, democracy, and anticensorship. The idea of collective identity, constructed from the shared goal of resisting government, is necessary for the online mobilization observed around the rogue accounts (Tindall & Robinson, 2017). There were overlaps among the different strategies employed in tweets, combining resistance with other strategies mentioned earlier here. Consider, for example, a tweet by @BadHombreNPS that includes a screenshot of the following: “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. John Muir” accompanied by “Good morning, #WildernessWarrior! This simple quote by John Muir reminds us To why we #resist for #Nature.” Tweets of resistance also promote acquisition of information and learning about how to engage in action: “A Practical Guide to Resisting the Trump Agenda #WeWillWin” posted by @ AltMountRainier on February 10th with the link indivisible.org. For the rogue national park Twitter accounts, resisting online evoked the sense of nationalistic duty and the preservation of one’s own identity. Talk, as resistance, situates the rogue accounts within the power struggles observed between agencies and government officials. The discourse of resistance highlights the corruption of democratic values and functions as an operationalized discourse strategy, which Fairclough (2013) suggests is implemented in order to contribute to social transformation.

Discussion The early paintings and photographs of the different national parks were the vehicle through which the United States associated its natural landscapes with its national identity. This discourse was constructed in order for the United States to differentiate itself from Europe, and later these signs came to embody preservation, wilderness, and public access as a representation of high standards of democracy and national identity. The godly presence of majestic mountains and landscapes (Thoreau, 1990), as well as American fauna, were used by the alternative accounts to challenge and criticize the government in a civil manner. The use of fauna, arguably, was a way to soften criticism of the administration, making the critiques easier to disseminate and for different political identities to engage with.

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

47

Because of their position as a US symbol, the rogue national parks accounts appeared to perform a watchdog role, striving for the government to uphold democratic values and verifiable scientific facts. The rogue accounts extended their discourses from what can be considered micro discursive strategies (of calling out for breaking silence and using #resist) to macro US identity symbols, such as landscape images and calls for democratic values. Identity-work has aided in demonstrating how the accounts build through discourse the desired identity to be displayed and hailed to the public via the use of counteractive tweeting. By constructing the identity of being a national symbol, the accounts simultaneously helped craft the alternative discourse happening through Twitter in the context of historical conception and meaning (Foucault, 1972). Through CDA, we noted how rogue accounts resisted government pressure and tested the boundaries of censorship on Twitter. The rogue accounts functioned as sites of discursive resistance to the Trump administration’s communication agenda. This was accomplished by continuously drawing on discourses of US national prestige to construct identities of resistance and situate themselves within larger historical discourses of national parks. The dominant governmental discourse against climate change, via the government’s censorship, influenced the formation of an emergent discourse practice within Twitter. In particular, the discourse strategies used are a demonstration of discontinuity, as the observed accounts constructed a new identity for the parks—as sites of discursive resistance and a force for democratic values. As such, they articulated a US national identity built upon the fight against censorship and for freedom of expression. We should be aware that in the creation of meaning about the identity of national parks, certain ideas were foregrounded and others were backgrounded or deleted. The values connected to the National Parks by the rogue accounts follow the mythical American narrative “that covers up a much more complicated and troubling history” (DeLuca, 2010, p. 490). Our research indicated that during the timeframe of our analysis, there were no mentions of Native American struggles or discourses, specifically, the killing and displacement of indigenous populations who inhabited the areas claimed as public (Runte, 2010), that counter the historically situated, nationalistic value of public lands. The democratic ideals employed and highlighted by the rogue accounts, therefore, hinder a fuller and historically more accurate understanding of the process of national park

48 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

creation, which was often antidemocratic and embedded in deeply troubling race and class struggles (DeLuca, 2010; Finney, 2014).

Conclusion The rogue NPS accounts strove to fight repression of the discussion surrounding climate change and, in doing so, may have motivated other Twitter users to contact elected officials about these issues. The accounts did so by drawing on a historical discourse of nationalist identity, which we have discussed in this study. That nationalist identity resulted in the accounts subtly reinforcing the ideologies of the supremacy of a benevolent US nation-state that cares for nature and the environment, while avoiding any discussion of aspects of the parks’ formation that invariably resulted in the displacement of native people (DeLuca, 2010). The positive framing and focus on particular historical symbols and historical discourses were used in order to mobilize groups against Trump, and against his censorship regarding climate change. Ultimately, wilderness continues to be one of the basic ingredients (Nash, 2014) shaping American identity and it is used within Twitter to maintain notions of collective group identity through its networked public sphere. The overall construction of preservation of wilderness as a form of resistance will continue to be a useful strategy as we move toward a future where the value of wilderness and natural preservation will continue to be argued about, and censorship and misinformation about climate change will continue to be challenged. Acknowledgments  The authors would like to thank all of the National Park Service workers who dedicate their time in the pursuit of justice and the preservation of nature. The authors would also like to thank Drs. Phaedra Pezzullo, Karen Tracy, and Timothy Kuhn for their input during the development of this research project, and the book editors who provided valuable feedback.

References Altman, I., & Low, S. M. (1992). Place attachment. New York: Plenum Press. Ausserhofer, J., & Maireder, A. (2013). National politics on twitter: Structures and topics of a networked public sphere. Information, Communication & Society, 16(3), 291–314.

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

49

Binkowski, B. (2017, June 1). Twitter’s alts and rogues. Snopes. Retrieved from: https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/06/01/alts-and-rogues/ Brinkley, D. (2009). The wilderness warrior. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. Burns, K. (Director). (2009). The National Parks: America’s best idea [Motion picture]. Arlington, TX: PBS. Carbaugh, D. A. (2005). Cultures in conversation. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Carson, R. (2002). Silent spring (40th Anniversary ed., 1st Mariner Books ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Chen, W., Tu, F., & Zheng, P. (2017). A transnational networked public sphere of air pollution: Analysis of a twitter network of PM2.5 from the risk society perspective. Information, Communication & Society, 20(7), 1005–1023. Davis, W. (2017, January 25). Rogue National Park accounts emerge on Twitter amid social media gag orders. National Public Radio. Retrieved from http:// www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/01/25/511664825/ rogue-national-park-accounts-emerge-on-twitter-amid-social-mediagag-orders DeLuca, K., & Demo, A. (2001). Imagining nature and erasing class and race: Carleton Watkins, John Muir, and the construction of wilderness. Environmental History, 6(4), 541–560. DeLuca, K. M. (2010). Salvaging wilderness from the tomb of history: A response to The national parks: America’s best idea. Environmental Communication, 4(4), 484–493. DeLuca, K. M., & Demo, A. T. (2000). Imaging nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the birth of environmentalism. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17(3), 241–260. Diaz, D. (2017, January 24). Badlands National Park deletes tweets on climate change. CNN. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com Fairclough, N. (1989). Language and power. London: Longman. Fairclough, N. (2013). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language. Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis. Finney, C. (2014). Black faces, white spaces: Reimagining the relationship of African Americans to the great outdoors. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (1st American ed.). New York: Pantheon. Frome, M. (2015). Rediscovering National Parks in the spirit of John Muir. Salt Lake City, NV: University of Utah Press. Graves, L. (2016). Deciding what’s true: The rise of political fact-checking in American journalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hahn, A., Judd, C.  M., & Park, B. (2010). Thinking about group differences: Ideologies and national identities. Psychological Inquiry, 21(2), 120–126.

50 

J. MARRAS TATE ET AL.

Herb, G. H., & Kaplan, D. H. (Eds.). (1999). Nested identities: Nationalism, territory, and scale. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Howkins, A., Orsi, J., & Fiege, M. (Eds.). (2016). National parks beyond the nation: Global perspectives on “America’s best idea”. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Kristof, N. (2017, January 6). As Donald Trump denies climate change, these kids die of it. New York Times. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.colorado.idm.oclc.org/docview/1856361381?accountid=14503 Light, A., & Hale, B. (2018). Year one of Donald Trump’s presidency on climate and the environment. Ethics, Policy & Environment, 21(1), 1–3. Milan, S. (2015). From social movements to cloud protesting: The evolution of collective identity. Information, Communication & Society, 18(8), 887–900. Milan, S. (2016). Liberated technology: Inside emancipatory communication activism. In E. Gordon & P. Mihailidis (Eds.), Civic media: Technology, design, practice (pp. 107–124). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Milan, S. (2017). Data activism as the new frontier of media activism. In V. W. Pickard & G. Yang (Eds.), Media activism in the digital age (pp. 151–163). London: Routledge. Muñoz, K. L. (2014). Transcribing silence: Culture, relationships, and communication. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Nash, R. (2014). Wilderness and the American mind (5th ed.). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Noe, R. (2017, January 26). Here’s a list of all the U.S. govt’s rogue Twitter accounts fighting Trump’s crackdown on science. Core 77. Retrieved from http://www.core77.com/posts/60230/Heres-a-List-of-All-the-US-GovtsRogue-Twitter-Accounts-Fighting-Trumps-Crackdown-on-Science Obar, J. A. (2014). Canadian advocacy 2.0: An analysis of social media adoption and perceived affordances by advocacy groups looking to advance activism in Canada. Canadian Journal of Communication, 39(2), 211–233. Perez, S. (2017, January 27). Rogue National Park Service Twitter account says it’s no longer run by government employees…but may be it never was. TechCrunch. Retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/27/ rogue-national-park-service-twitter-account-says-its-o-longer-run-by-government-employees-but-maybe-it-never-was/ Pezzullo, P. C., & Cox, J. R. (2018). Environmental communication and the public sphere (5th ed.). Los Angeles: Sage. Rennie, A. (2006). The importance of national parks to nation-building: Support for the National Parks act (2000) in the Scottish parliament. Scottish Geographical Journal, 122(3), 223–232. Ross-Bryant, L. (2005). Sacred sites: Nature and nation in the U.S.  National Parks. Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, 15(1), 31–62.

2  GOING “ROGUE”: NATIONAL PARKS, DISCOURSES OF AMERICAN… 

51

Runte, A. (2010). National Parks: The American experience (4th ed.). Lanham, MD: Taylor Trade. Scherman, A., Arriagada, A., & Valenzuela, S. (2015). Student and environmental protests in Chile: The role of social media. Politics, 35(2), 151–171. Schwartz, S. (2006). A theory of cultural value orientations: Explication and applications. Comparative Sociology, 5(2), 137–182. Shifman, L. (2013). Memes in digital culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. New York: Penguin. Spillman, B. (2017, January 31). Updated poll: Trump and non-Trump voters agree on public lands. Reno Gazette Journal. Retrieved from https://www.rgj.com/stor y/life/outdoors/recreation/2017/01/31/ poll-trump-and-non-trump-voters-agree-public-lands/97307654/ Stoddart, M. J., & MacDonald, L. (2011). “Keep it wild, keep it local”: Comparing news media and the internet as sites for environmental movement activism for jumbo pass, British Columbia. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 36(4), 313–336. Thoreau, H. D. (1990). Walden. Philadelphia: Courage Books. Tindall, D.  B., & Robinson, J.  L. (2017). Collective action to save the ancient temperate rainforest: Social networks and environmental activism in Clayoquot sound. Ecology and Society, 22(1), 481–494. Tracy, K., & Robles, J. S. (2013). Everyday talk: Building and reflecting identities (2nd ed.). New York: The Guilford Press. Tudoroiu, T. (2014). Social media and revolutionary waves: The case of the Arab spring. New Political Science, 36(3), 346–365. Tyrrell, I. (2012). America’s national parks: The transnational creation of national space in the progressive era. Journal of American Studies, 46(01), 1–21. Vickery, J. R. (2014). The curious case of confession bear: The reappropriation of online macro-image memes. Information, Communication & Society, 17(3), 301–325. Wes, S. (2017, February 7). Why hikers need hunters and vice versa. Outside. Retrieved from https://www.outsideonline.com/2155826/public-landsdefense-glimmer-bi-partisan-cooperation Zelinsky, W. (1984). O say, can you see?: Nationalistic emblems in the landscape. Winterthur Portfolio, 19(4), 277–286.

CHAPTER 3

Political Candidates’ Discussions on Twitter During Election Season: A Network Approach Maurice Vergeer

Introduction Activity on the most popular social networking sites in the Western world—Facebook and Twitter—is still increasing, albeit at a slower rate than before (Constine, 2017). Some reports show that this activity may be declining due to the distribution of fake news (Shin, Jian, Driscoll, & Bar, 2018). Political candidates have been shown to use social media to communicate directly to one another and to the general public, especially during election campaigns. Candidates recognized the potential of social media early on (Vergeer, Hermans, & Sams, 2013), especially as a way to circumvent journalists as gatekeepers to directly reach citizens. Motives for politicians’ use of social media (particularly Twitter) is to reach potential

M. Vergeer (*) Department of Communication, Behavioural Science Institute, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 G. Bouvier, J. E. Rosenbaum (eds.), Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41421-4_3

53

54 

M. VERGEER

voters, present and disseminate political ideas, and support and promote other party candidates (Parmelee & Bichard, 2011). Studies of online networks on social media are relatively rare and little is known about how politicians use their social media behavior in electoral campaigning. Previous research shows that of the level of interactivity of politician’s tweets varies per country: of all the tweets sent by political candidates in the UK and The Netherlands, 31% of the British tweets and 47.4% of the Dutch tweets are interactive, while 15.8% of the British candidates’ tweets and 22.1% of Dutch candidates’ tweets are geared toward interacting with other politicians (Graham, Jackson, & Broersma, 2014). However, how interaction takes place, or more specifically, who interacts with whom, is often not fully clear. Using a full network approach provides a better understanding of the structural characteristics of entire political communication networks among candidates, contributing to the existing body of knowledge regarding political communication on social media. During election campaigns, candidates use social media to post regular status updates (e.g., tweets) about their campaign activities and their opinions regarding specific political issues. For the most part, these tweets are not directed at specific people, as previous research has shown (Graham et al., 2014). Instead, they serve as broadcasts to the general audience on Twitter. Still, this mostly applies to prolific politicians such as party leaders who have a large following. Following the equalization thesis, less prominent candidates may show much more engagement in discussions with people. Politicians engage with many different types of actors on social media, such as citizens, journalists, other candidates from their parties, as well as those from other parties (Graham, et al., 2014). The current study focuses specifically on Dutch political candidates’ communications amongst each other from a communication network perspective. The decision to use a communication network analysis is born from the fact that it allows for a focus on the structural behavioral aspect of social media use, beyond merely pushing the follow button on social media pages. This study aims to contribute to understanding online social communication as a campaign instrument for elections. Therefore, the focus of the present study is to answer the following research questions: (1) Which candidates are most active in communicating (outdegree) with other candidates in the election campaign, and who receive the most directed tweets from other candidates (indegree), and how can this be explained?

3  POLITICAL CANDIDATES’ DISCUSSIONS ON TWITTER DURING… 

55

(2) What is the structure of the online communication network of candidates in an election campaign in terms of (a) centrality, (b) network homophily, (c) reciprocity and (d) normalization and equalization?

The Dutch Electoral System The decision to utilize a communication network approach is in part based on the present study’s focus on the Dutch national elections, and subsequently, the nature of the Dutch electoral system. The Dutch election system is a multiparty system using preferential voting, meaning that political parties submit a list of their candidates, ordered from most to least preferable to be elected to parliament, according to the party. However, depending on the number of preferential votes candidates receive from voters, this order can be changed: candidates ranked low for election can still be elected for parliament if they receive enough preferential votes. The parties themselves are ranked for placement on the ballot by the Electoral Council, based on the number of votes they received in the previous election. Furthermore, the Dutch election system is comprised of a large number of participating political parties. Whereas many countries have two to four political parties running in each election, from 2002 onward the Netherlands has had at least 15 parties participating in the elections. These range from established parties (e.g., VVD, CDA, PvdA) to single-issue parties (e.g., Animal Party, 50PLUS, Pirate Party). Finally, Dutch politicians have been known to be early adopters of social media, particularly Twitter. As early as 2009, during the campaign for the European parliament, candidates started using Twitter for campaign purposes (cf., Vergeer et al., 2013). Social media use by political parties and candidates has been an integral part of their election campaigns ever since. In the context of a multiparty system with many parties and many candidates that can compete amongst each other for preference votes, even within the party, communication among these candidates might be an essential way to distinguish oneself from the others. A communication network approach thus seems particularly useful to uncover their communication behavior on social media.

56 

M. VERGEER

Twitter and Political Communication The use of social media implies social interactivity and communication between people to create mutual understanding (Rogers, 1995), or even a community (Dewey, 1944). However, even though social media use in political communication is multifaceted, thus far, the focus in research is mostly on its polarization-enhancing properties (cf. Conover et al., 2011; Lee, Shin, & Hong, 2018). In the context of elections, candidates’ use of social media reflects a battle for scarce resources, such as media attention and visibility, as well as a belief that increased visibility on social media might lead to more votes. Networks in political communication refer to relations between actors in the political playing field: candidates who act on behalf of their political party during the election campaign. They use Twitter for individualized and personalized communication to wider audiences using undirected or ‘broadcasting’ tweets (i.e., tweets addressed to no one in particular). Forwarding messages (i.e., retweets), initially produced by others may also be used, and candidates may engage in direct conversation with others on Twitter. Previous research shows that online communication is related to network characteristics. For instance, Vergeer and Hermans (2013) showed that the more Twitter followers a candidate has, the more likely it is the candidate will tweet. However, these findings also show this relation to be curvilinear, implying that the more followers that candidates have, the likelihood of tweeting decreases. This decrease indicates that social media are becoming less social and interactive over time (cf. the conversation model by Bordewijk & Van Kaam, 1986) and increasingly resemble broadcasting channels (cf. the allocution model by Bordewijk & Van Kaam, 1986). As such, the promise of new (social) ways of communication associated with social media tends to be unfulfilled when candidates become more popular.

Reciprocity and Network Homophily Arguably, reciprocity is a fundamental aspect of communication in general. Whereas providing information—in terms of broadcasting—is one-­ directional and not explicitly directed at someone in particular, a more “social” view of communication might assume communication that involves reciprocation. In political communication, reciprocity may lead to online discussions and even deliberation (Gonzalez-Bailon, Kaltenbrunner, & Banchs, 2010). Previous research, however, indicates that this is not

3  POLITICAL CANDIDATES’ DISCUSSIONS ON TWITTER DURING… 

57

likely to occur in an online environment. Even though almost half of all tweets received by candidates are replied to (Graham et al., 2014), Vergeer and Hermans (2013) show that the more followers a candidate has, the less often will the candidate reply. Directing tweets to an opponent on Twitter is not without risk. By addressing and replying to an opponent, that opponent is given extra attention on social media. Although Zajonc’s mere exposure hypothesis (1968) suggests that more attention might lead to more favorable attitudes, during elections this is more likely to occur for candidates of the same party, whereas candidates from other parties are perceived less favorably, enforcing increased polarization between political parties. One way for candidates to avoid having to deal with an opponent’s tweets is to ignore these tweets altogether instead of engaging in a Twitter discussion where the outcome is uncertain. This suggests that replying as a form of reciprocity in communication networks is more prevalent between candidates of the same party and less so between candidates from different parties. Therefore, the following hypothesis is posed: Hypothesis 1: Candidates from different political parties differ in the degree they reciprocate to tweets In general, people tend to create groups with others who share characteristics. This phenomenon is known as network homophily (McPherson, Smith-Lovin, & Cook, 2001). Homophily occurs in natural settings, and has done so since before the Internet emerged as a new communication infrastructure. However, on the Internet, homophily seems to be more visible and quicker to develop around specific issues. Homophily is visible on the Internet as echo chambers and polarization between Twitter communities (Boutyline & Willer, 2017; Gruzd & Roy, 2014). It is likely that homophily is also present in the communication network of political candidates from similar political parties. These may flock together in communication networks. To assess whether this is indeed the case in a competitive setting such as an election campaign, the following hypothesis is tested for several political (ideology and party membership) and structural characteristics (sex and incumbency, i.e., having already held office): Hypothesis 2: Candidates’ communication networks show significant levels of network homophily for political ideology, and political party, sex, and incumbency.

58 

M. VERGEER

Opinion Leadership Introduced by Katz and Lazarsfeld in their seminal study Personal Influence (1955), the concept of opinion leaders refers to people in social networks who are important to others for opinion formation. In social network terminology, opinion leaders are often equated to people with a central position in a social network. Their indegree (in case of Twitter: followers and incoming tweets) as well as the reach of their tweets is higher when compared to other users in the same network. Some evidence exists that higher-ranked candidates (e.g., party leaders) are increasingly using social media mostly for broadcasting purposes and not for communication and interaction on social media. Graham, Broersma, Hazelhoff, and Van ‘t Haar (2013) show that the vast majority of political tweets are for broadcasting (68.3%), while Vergeer and Hermans (2013) show that the more followers (social indegree) candidates have, the less likely it is that candidates themselves will follow others (social outdegree). A social network can be distinguished from a communication network, irrespective of these networks being online (i.e., social media) or offline (i.e., face-to-face communication). A social network can be viewed as a latent or dormant network of people that only manifests itself by actual behavior, either through meeting face-to-face (cf. offline networks) or communicating over longer distances using digital media (cf. online networks). In terms of Twitter as a social and communication network, following others on Twitter creates a latent—underlying—social network, because it does not involve actual behavior for it to exist. However, once people start to tweet, others in the latent social network are informed of this tweet in their timeline, resulting in a manifest communication network, particularly when these tweets are retweeted or replied to. As a result, one can expect that there is a strong alignment between an online social network and online communication network, suggesting that those with more extensive social networks also have larger communication networks or at least show more communication activities. Furthermore, candidates with more followers are expected to have more tweets directed at them (i.e., more tweets received) while candidates who follow others more often will also be more communicative on Twitter (i.e., more tweets sent). Therefore, the following hypotheses are proposed:

3  POLITICAL CANDIDATES’ DISCUSSIONS ON TWITTER DURING… 

59

Hypothesis 3: The higher the social indegree (number of followers) is, the higher the communicative indegree (number of tweets received) that candidates will have. Hypothesis 4: The higher the social outdegree (number of following) is, the higher the communicative outdegree (number of tweets sent) that candidates will have. An opinion leader, due to her or his large number of followers (i.e., social indegree), can rapidly disseminate information across extensive networks and reach many online friends and foes at the same time. Vergeer and Hermans (2013) show that the social indegree is related positively to the communication outdegree: politicians who share their opinions very frequently will accumulate many followers. This study will test whether this also holds for a network of candidates. Therefore, the following hypothesis is posed: Hypothesis 5: The higher the social indegree (number of followers) of a candidate on Twitter, the higher the communication outdegree (the number of tweets sent) on Twitter.

Preferential Attachment Previous research (Barabási & Albert, 1999) suggests that online popularity (cf. indegree) is the result of a process called preferential attachment. In general, preferential attachment suggests that the more popular a node (e.g., an actor, a politician, a person, or even an organization) is in a network, the more likely it is that it will form new relations as compared to less popular nodes, suggesting nodes’ linking to one another is not a random process. This implies that when nodes enter a network at an early stage (or in this case, when candidates subscribed to Twitter early on), they are more likely to acquire more relations (i.e., followers), than those who enter the network later. Even though Barabási and Albert demonstrated the existence of preferential attachment for hyperlinks on the Web, Merton (1968) has identified what he called the Matthew effect (regarding accumulated advantage) before: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath” (p.  3). When applied to Twitter, preferential attachment suggests that candidates who have been subscribed to Twitter for a prolonged period have been more visible online, thereby

60 

M. VERGEER

increasing the likelihood of becoming more known among fellow candidates. As a result, this autonomous process suggests that candidates who have been active on Twitter longer will attract more followers and more tweets will be directed at them. As for understanding why candidates have a higher communication outdegree (those that tweet a lot themselves), possibly the length of being subscribed to Twitter explains communicative indegree and outdegree. This leads to the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 6: The longer a candidate is subscribed to Twitter, the higher is the (a) communicative indegree and the (b) communicative outdegree of the candidate.

Normalization Versus Equalization Whereas established parties have extensive campaign organizations, more experience, as well as larger financial budgets and more human resources to conduct their campaigns, new parties have far fewer resources. The question then is whether innovations such as inexpensive online social media allow disadvantaged, mostly smaller political parties, to compensate for the lack of resources. The normalization and equalization thesis in political communication (Gibson & McAllister, 2014) states that new technology enables fringe and new parties to join the campaign on an equal footing with established and/or larger parties. Findings thus far mostly show that there is little evidence of equalization: established and/ or larger parties still use innovative online technology more, and also benefit the most from it. Therefore, the playing field is not level, meaning there is no equalization but normalization (Gibson & McAllister, 2014). Although these findings pertain to more extensive Twitter networks in political communication, the present study tests whether normalization extends to communication networks between candidates. This implies that if normalization takes place, candidates from larger parties and candidates ranked higher on the ballot have a higher communication outdegree. The hypotheses are as follows: Hypothesis 7: Candidates from more powerful political parties have higher communicative outdegrees (i.e., they tweet more frequently) than candidates from less powerful parties. Hypothesis 8: The higher the candidates are positioned on the ballot, the higher is their communication outdegree.

3  POLITICAL CANDIDATES’ DISCUSSIONS ON TWITTER DURING… 

61

Dutch national politics is dominated by male politicians. The percentage of female members of parliament across time in the Netherlands has consistently stayed below 40% (OECD, 2019). One explanation is that in elections to date, female candidates are positioned lower on the ballot than male candidates (Van Aelst, Maddens, Noppe, & Fiers, 2008). As a result, female candidates receive fewer votes than do male candidates. Bystrom, Robertson Banwart, and Kaid (2004) argue that while press coverage of candidates in the press was evenly distributed among male and female candidates, press coverage of female candidates tends to focus on their gender, marital status, and children more so than it does for their male counterparts. Carlson, Djupsund, and Strandberg (2013) show that female candidates are more likely to adopt and use blogging more often and more extensively, suggesting perhaps that female candidates may try to use new media to retain control over how they are portrayed in the campaign. Meeks (2016) shows that female politicians are more interactive than male politicians on Twitter, suggesting female may be more extravert and sociable on social media than male candidates. Conversely, previous research (Vergeer & Hermans, 2013) on general Twitter communication performed by candidates showed no differences between male and female candidates. However, female candidates might show more extensive communicative behavior on Twitter (i.e., send more tweets) to stand their ground in a male-dominated election campaign and against other male candidates, in order to compensate for any disadvantages. The hypothesis is as follows: Hypothesis 9: Female candidates have a higher communication outdegree than male candidates.

Statistical Controls: Populism, Ideology, and Incumbency Populist parties are on the rise in Europe and the Netherlands (Rooduijn, Lange, & Brug, 2014). Populism is defined as an “ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’” (Mudde, 2004, p.  543). Populist parties consider themselves the voice of the volonté générale (general will) of the people, opposing not only parties in the government but established political parties altogether. This suggests that

62 

M. VERGEER

populist parties are much more active in expressing the general will of the people to other candidates and parties than candidates of non-populist parties. As for ideology, little is known in terms of left-wing versus right-­ wing networks among candidates. Previous research into Dutch candidates (Vergeer & Hermans, 2013) has shown that ideology is unrelated to candidates’ general tweeting activities. Whether this also holds for a candidate’s communication networks is something that future research needs to address. Furthermore, since Evans, Cordova, and Sipole (2014) show that challengers tend to be more active in tweeting, specifically attacking incumbents, the model will include incumbency of candidates to address whether incumbent send and receive more tweets than new candidates do.

Data, Measurements, and Analysis Data The election campaign for the 2012 Dutch National Election was relatively brief because the elections took place shortly after the summer vacation. Due to the lack of an official legal start of the campaign, political parties chose different start dates for their campaigns (mostly between August 14th and August 25th 2012). Therefore, the data were collected during the 40 days running up to the date of the 2012 Dutch National Election (September 12th, 2012). A total of 972 candidates ran, divided across 20 political parties (see Appendix). The study started by establishing which of these candidates had a Twitter account, using various online sources, and snowball sampling the social Twitter networks of other candidates. This resulted in the finding that 353 candidates actively tweeted during the run-up to the election. Subsequently, publicly accessible tweets of these candidates were downloaded using Twitter’s REST API. In total, these candidates produced 16,729 public tweets that were directed at other candidates during the 40 days running up to Election Day. Possible ethical concerns surrounding the use of social media content was mitigated by the public nature of the tweets, the public stature of the political candidates, and the fact that the analysis does not report the content of any individual tweets.

3  POLITICAL CANDIDATES’ DISCUSSIONS ON TWITTER DURING… 

63

Measurements To determine whether a tweet is a directed communicative relation, posts were mined for all Twitter handles present in the tweets by searching for @usernames. Each @username in a tweet constitutes a directed communicative relation from the candidate sending the tweet to the candidate addressed in the tweet (i.e., @username). Based on these directed relations, centrality measures can be determined, such as communication indegree (the number of incoming communications) and communication outdegree (the number of outgoing communications). The current study also distinguishes between social indegree and social outdegree. These indicators refer to the number of followers of the candidate and the number of candidates followed by the candidate. Political party membership of candidates was based on party election lists by the Electoral Council (Electoral Council, 2012). Sex of the candidate (male = 65.7%, female = 34.3%) was determined drawing on the same Electoral Council list. The political power of political parties was determined by the number of seats in the previous term (mean = 17.6, SD = 11.3). The ballot position (mean = 24.6, SD = 19.0) of the various political candidates was obtained from the Electoral Council (2012). Populism consisted of two categories: populist parties (Party for Freedom, and Socialist Party) and non-populist parties (all other parties) (Rooduijn et al., 2014). Incumbency was determined by comparing the list of parliament membership with the candidate lists. Party ideology, measured by coding party manifestos of the major political parties, was obtained from the Manifesto data set (Volkens, Lehmann, Matthieß, Merz, & Regel, 2016). The scale was recoded into three categories (right-wing, left-wing, and other parties). The duration of having a Twitter account was determined by calculating the difference (in years, or fractions thereof) between the date of Election Day and the date of signing up to Twitter (mean = 2.41 years, SD = 1.06). To measure homophily for the descriptive analysis, the assortativity scores for candidates and political parties were calculated, using the attributes political party, Left-Right position, and sex. A negative score indicated heterophily, while a positive score indicated homophily. The maximum was defined as 1, while the minimum depends on the network structure (Newman, 2002, 2003).

64 

M. VERGEER

Method For descriptive network analysis and visualization, the R packages iGraph (Csárdi, 2017) and ggplot2 (Wickham et al., 2019) were used. The data had a hierarchically nested structure: politicians within political parties. The intraclass correlations for communicative outdegree (ICC = 0.073) and communicative indegree (ICC = 0.275) were sufficiently high to warrant multilevel negative binomial regression analysis, using the R package lme4 (Bates et  al., 2019, p.  4). Prior to the analyses, the models were checked for multicollinearity, which was absent (VIFmax