Mapping sociocultural controversies across digital media platforms: one week of #gamergate on Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr

ABSTRACT

Social media play a prominent role in mediating issues of public concern, not only providing the stage on which public debates play out but also shaping their topics and dynamics. Building on and extending existing approaches to both issue mapping and social media analysis, this article explores ways of accounting for popular media practices and the special case of ‘born digital’ sociocultural controversies. We present a case study of the GamerGate controversy with a particular focus on a spike in activity associated with a 2015 Law and Order: SVU episode about gender-based violence and harassment in games culture that was widely interpreted as being based on events associated with GamerGate. The case highlights the importance and challenges of accounting for the cultural dynamics of digital media within and across platforms.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• digital culture
• games culture
• gender
• issue mapping
• Twitter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. http://boingboing.net/2015/01/28/a-beginners-guide-to-the-red.html

2. Teasing out these threads is beyond the scope of this article, but there are a range of primers with various ideological slants at sites such as Wikipedia and Know Your Meme, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate

3. This has occurred on average around twice each month for the period in which GamerGate tweets are being collected, so there is an unknown number of spikes in the data set with an artificially low ‘ceiling’, and we are unable to determine how much ‘height’ has been cut off.

4. http://www.bustle.com/articles/63466-im-brianna-wu-and-im-risking-my-life-standing-up-to-gamergate

5. http://i.xomf.com/ypjxw.png

6. http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2015/02/12/law-order-svu-takes-on-gamergate-cant-press-reset-button/

7. We set a minimum frequency of 20, producing a list of hashtags that co-occurred at least 20 times during the week of analysis.

8. We set the parameters to not crawl further than the ~350 seeds.

9. The video is entitled ‘#gamergate sings: We Do (it for free)’ and had 525 views at the time of writing.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jean Burgess

Dr Jean Burgess is a Professor of Digital Media and Director of the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) at Queensland University of Technology. Her research focuses on the cultures, politics, and methods for studying social and mobile media platforms.

Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández

Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández is a PhD candidate at Queensland University of Technology and a member of the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) with a background in journalism. Her research seeks to understand the cultural dynamics of race and identity in Australian social media.