Hot Issue Publics in the New Media Age: An Analysis of the Charlotte Protest

ABSTRACT

People who suddenly take interest in a social movement because it is in the media spotlight are members of the hot issue public, whereas the enduring public has an ongoing interest in the issue after it fades from public discourse. This is the first study to compare the behaviors of each public through a social media analysis. We performed structural topic modeling on 151,004 tweets to investigate any differences in topics each type of public tweeted about. In addition, we analyzed whether each public’s generation of Twitter posts followed the power law with regard to the extent to which the workload of posting tweets was shared equally. Finally, we explored whether the hot issue public’s tweets subsided more quickly than the enduring public’s tweets. Theoretical and practical implications are addressed, including a discussion of hot issue publics on social media.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• Black Lives Matter
• hot issue publics
• protest
• social media

Acknowledgments

We thank the editorial team, Sung-Un Yang, Ph.D., and Nicholas Browning, Ph.D., for assigning our manuscript to exceptional reviewers and for giving us the opportunity to revise this manuscript. We thank our reviewers for helping us to strengthen the manuscript based on their deep expertise and extensive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.