Identity Activism is a new phenomenon afforded by the massive popularity of social media. It consists of the prominent display of a social movement symbol within a space reserved for description of the self. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine provides a contemporary (yet unfortunate) opportunity to observe this phenomenon. Here, we introduce and explore this concept in the context of the recent Twitter trend of displaying the Ukraine flag emoji in bios and names to signal support of Ukraine. We explore several questions, including: how has the popularity of this trend changed over time, are users who display the flag more likely to be connected to others who do, and what types of users are and are not participating. We find that Ukraine flag emoji prevalence in both names and bios increased many-fold in late February 2022, with it becoming the 11th most prevalent emoji in bios and the 3rd most prevalent emoji in names during March. We also find evidence that users who display the flag in their bio or name are more likely to follow and be followed by others who also do so, as compared to users who do not. Finally, we observe that users who share politically left-leaning messages were most likely to display the emoji. Those who share account information from alternative social media sites and non-personal accounts appear least likely. These findings give us insight into how users participate in Identity Activism, what connections exist between participating users, and, in this particular case, what types of users participate.
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This content will become publicly available on April 11, 2025
Who supports Bernie? Analyzing identity and ideological variation on Twitter during the 2020 democratic primaries
Using a novel dataset of 590M messages by 21M users, we present the first large-scale examination of the behavior of likely Bernie supporters on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. Democratic primaries and presidential election. We use these data to dispel empirically the notion of a unified, stereotypical Bernie supporter (e.g., the “Bernie Bro”). Instead, our work uncovers significant variation in the identities and ideologies of Bernie supporters who were active on Twitter. Our work makes three contributions to the literature on social media and social movements. Methodologically, we present a novel mixed methods approach to surface identity and ideological variation within a movement via use of patterns in who retweets whom (i.e. who retweets which other users) and who retweets what (i.e. who retweets which specific tweets). Substantively, documentation of these variations challenges a trend in the social movement literature to assume actors within a particular movement are unified in their ideology, identity, and values.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2145051
- PAR ID:
- 10528534
- Editor(s):
- Branda, Francesco
- Publisher / Repository:
- PLOS One
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PLOS ONE
- Volume:
- 19
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 1932-6203
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- e0294735
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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