Abstract:
Twitter has emerged as a prominent social media platform for activism and counterpublic narratives. The counterpublics leverage hashtags to build a diverse support network and share content on a global platform that counters the dominant narrative. This paper applies the framework of connective action on the counter-narrative campaign over the cause of death of #SushantSinghRajput. We combine descriptive network, modularity, and hashtag based topical analysis to identify three major mechanisms underlying the campaign: generative role taking, hashtagbased narratives and formation of alignment network towards a common cause. Using the case study of #SushantSinghRajput, we highlight how connective action framework can be used to identify different strategies adopted by counterpublics for the emergence of connective action. Then we do a descriptive network analysis from connective action framework on Citizenship Amendment Act campaign to get see how campaigners and counter-campaigners aligned via follower network. Then, we study how hateful users exploited the elements of protest mobilization (i.e., resources and ability to use them) during the divergent discourse on #CitizenshipAmendmentAct in India. We also build a stance-aware hate detection pipeline which outperforms the pervious models. Lastly, we compare and contrast the positions the opposing stance users take during the online discourse.
