Twitter Campaigns Around the Fifth IPCC Report: Campaign Spreading, Shared Hashtags, and Separate Communities

Abstract

<p>In this article, we analyzed campaigning on Twitter around the publication of the fifth Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 1 report in September, 2013. In particular, we analyzed how participation in a specific campaign and use of hashtags connected to the campaign developed over time and what kind of sub-flows of tweets or spinoff conversations emerged. The campaign hashtag that we observed later appeared in connection to sharing of an article that was not directly connected to the original campaign. Although both the original campaign and this sub-flow of it were connected to the broader context of climate change, the sub-flow formed a separate community of tweeters that did not overlap with tweeters participating in the original campaign. Twitter campaigns have flexible boundaries both around the shared issues and around the communities of tweeters. Our results show that using information spreading approach does not account for the evolution of campaign spreading on Twitter, as other factors, such as celebrity endorsement, may heavily influence the spread of information and content on Twitter. Thus, our results suggest that although different tweeters participated in the two separate campaigns using shared hashtags, hashtags per se do not always indicate shared communities of tweeters nor can they always be considered as indicators of completely shared issues online.<br /></p>