Hashtag Drift

Abstract

Sociologists and political scientists have drawn attention to the importance of hashtags as tools for political organizing and protest online. Examining a set of political hashtags on Tumblr, we discover linguistic changes in the ways that the hashtags are used over time. As time passes, the community uses a more diverse vocabulary of hashtags in conjunction with the central political tag, suggesting that the meaning of the tag expands or proliferates -- a phenomenon we dub hashtag drift. We also find evidence that this occurs not just on the level of the community but at the level of individual users who, as time progresses, use the hashtag in conjunction with a more diverse vocabulary of other tags. This study sheds light on the dynamics of political engagement through hashtag activism.

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