ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the personal, political acts of live tweets the movement by supporters and dissenters can amass to larger, political meaning as expressed through Twitter hashtags. The usage of Twitter hashtags as an organic, community-level convention for annotating tweets can be viewed through the lens of networked framing. Several prior studies have examined hashtags as vehicles that sustain framing effects during social movements and protest cycles. Outside networked relationships with other hashtags, prior studies on Twitter in politics have found individual political hashtags to be a powerful vehicle for sustained networked framing effects. Hashtags provided open calls for producer partisans to participate in the ideological crowdsourced framing of the politics of the Occupy movement. Hashtag wars can prove detrimental to the identity of developing social movements, as it can frustrate the ability of the movement to disseminate news and information, thus alienating or distancing supportive publics.
