Telematics and Informatics 61 (2021) 101600

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Telematics and Informatics

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tele

Hashtag activism and connective action: A case study

of #HongKongPoliceBrutality
Rong Wang a, *, Alvin Zhou b
a
Department of Communication, University of Kentucky, 234 Blazer Dining, 343 S. Martin Luther King Blvd, 40526 Lexington, KY, United States
b
Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: This study applies the connective action framework and network analysis to analyze how coun­
Hashtag activism terpublics used social media to form cliques and mobilize support toward a local issue at the
Connective action global stage. It presents a case study of the 2019 Hong Kong protest to uncover under what
Retweeting
conditions hashtag activism can evolve into connective action. The network approach allows us to
Online information sharing
examine users and content simultaneously to identify three mechanisms underlying the move­
ment: generative role-taking, hashtag based storytelling, and issue alignment through diverse
social groups. Combining descriptive network analysis, modularity analysis, and topic modeling,
we demonstrated that hashtag activists during the Hong Kong 2019 protests used different
strategies of connective action to engage in information sharing and drive the emergence of
connective action. (122 words)

1. Introduction

The 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests started on June 9, 2019 with the public’s opposition to the government’s proposed amendment
to the extradition law but have deeper roots in other contentious matters related to the city’s autonomy, its political system, and the
perceived control by the central government in Beijing. At the early stage, the protests were legally approved marches and remained
peaceful. As the protests progressed, violent clashes between the protesters and the Hong Kong Police were reported by activists and
Western media. According to Griffiths and Yeung (2020), Hong Kong police fired about 16,000 rounds of tear gas and arrested more
than 6,000 people throughout the protests. The confrontations led to the finalization of the movement slogan (i.e. “Five demands, and
no one less”), which included the demand of launching an independent inquiry into alleged police brutality.
The media in Hong Kong and mainland China have largely remained silent about the issue. They criticized the Western media as
“deviated from objective reporting and professional standards” (Global Time, 2019). Hong Kong protesters and their foreign sup­
porters used local and global social media platforms to spread protest messages about police brutality to the world (Steger, 2019).
Twitter was among the most popular platforms used to document excessive force from the Hong Kong police and garner support from
the outside world (Ho, 2019), leading to a viral hashtag #HongKongPoliceBrutality.
The literature on social movement has not defined the profiles of Twitter activists. One consensus is that simply tweeting about a
social movement does not make a Twitter user an activist. The spectrum of activities counted as social movement contribution is much
extended in a digital environment (Wang et al., 2016; Lee & Chan, 2018). Twitter activists engage in a variety of activism activities

* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: rong.wang@uky.edu (R. Wang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2021.101600
Received 13 October 2020; Received in revised form 29 January 2021; Accepted 1 March 2021
Available online 6 March 2021
0736-5853/© 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
R. Wang and A. Zhou Telematics and Informatics 61 (2021) 101600

such as organizing online petitions, coordinating offline protests, and building a counterpublic narrative through hashtags (Jackson
et al., 2020; Wang and Chu, 2019). The goal of this study is to uncover what strategies can be used by Twitter activists to share information
about social movements on social media and to move beyond slacktivism.
This current study focuses on #HongKongPoliceBrutality as a case study for two reasons. First, the police brutality issue is highly
controversial and this case study enables an analysis into narratives that activists used on social media to counter the mainstream (i.e.
from legacy mass media) silence during the protest. Hong Kong protesters constitute counterpublics, who are defined “by the role they
play in constructing and maintaining knowledge shared by members of marginalized communities while simultaneously working to
make visible issues specific to marginalized experience” (Jackson & Banaszczyk, 2016, p. 393). Counterpublics utilize social media to
distribute messages to diverse social groups, challenging dominant narratives and raising awareness (Jackson and Foucault Welles,
2015, 2016; Kuo, 2018). Second, the focal issue involved, police brutality, is experienced in other parts of the world (e.g. recent waves
of protests surrounding the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the United States, Ray et al., 2017). The examination of this case in Hong
Kong could offer important insights into how protesters may strategically leverage Twitter, to mobilize global attention and support
across borders.
To guide our inquiry, the framework of connective action is applied. The debate about the value of hashtag activism is funda­
mentally about the role of digital media in facilitating social movement. Bennett and Segerberg (2012) argue that digital technologies
enable individuals to create personalized messages (e.g., memes, and creative hashtags) and co-create meanings about social issues,
resulting in a paradigm shift from collective action to connective action. The emergence of connective action challenges the necessity
of a formal organizing process or the involvement of formal organizations as self-claimed activists take actions to coordinate them­
selves and make their behavior visible to relevant parties (Bimber et al., 2012).
The framework of connection action is useful in identifying specific roles individual activists may play in facilitating a collective
effort, and in examining how they interact with each other to build the momentum. Guided by this framework, the current study
investigates how counterpublics engage in information sharing on social media to mobilize support and move beyond slacktivism.
Through the lens of a network perspective, we focus on unpacking three mechanisms connecting activists and issues addressed by
them. The first mechanism focuses on activists engaging in generative role taking to drive the bottom-up process of information
sharing. The second mechanism focuses on hashtag-based story-telling to raise awareness and mobilize supporters. The third mech­
anism is the issue alignment across different parts of the information sharing network to achieve information virality. We then present
the background of the case study with #HongKongPoliceBrutality and propose research questions to further unpack the profiles of
counterpublics that are engaged in social media discourse about the social movement, their narrative strategies, and information
sharing strategies.
This study makes several contributions. First, it analyzes users and content simultaneously to examine the mechanisms underlying
the emergence of connective action. Second, the use of mixed methods unpacks different roles Twitter users may play in connective
action. It provides evidence about how to differentiate slacktivism and activism when analyzing digital social movement data. Third, it
also demonstrates how self-organized activists used strategies to co-construct meaning about a social movement to move beyond the
expression of outrage and build a subcommunity for further advocacy.

2. Literature review

The use of social media platforms during social movements has been on the rise. Evidence can be found from large-scale global
social movements such as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, to more targeted localized advocacy movements (Castells, 2012).
Social media provide a public space where concerned citizens can create a shared meaning of the protest message, express their
common experiences of oppression, and mobilize resources for offline participation (Goh & Pang, 2016; Ichau et al., 2019). In recent
Hong Kong protests, the use of social media has been found to facilitate digital participation and encourage offline behavior (Lee &
Chan, 2018; Shen et al., 2020).
Twitter has become a prominent digital platform where digital activism has emerged. Twitter’s affordances allow users to design
and disseminate messages to reach relevant social groups for potential support (Majchrzak et al., 2013). In particular, Twitter hashtags
have played a significant role in advancing counter-narratives, mobilizing supporters, and building diverse networks of support (Wang
et al., 2016). The increasing use of Twitter hashtags in activism-related political activities has been characterized under the umbrella
term “hashtag activism.” Hashtag activism is a type of digital activism where large numbers of postings appear on social media under a
common hashtag with a particular social or political claim (Yang, 2016). Using a common hashtag creates a social context for
communication by connecting like-minded individuals into a networked public (Xiong et al., 2019; Xu, 2020). Hashtags consist
“representative symbols of personal action frames” (Pond and Lewis, 2019, p. 5).
There has been a constant debate about what values hashtag activism brings to social movements. On one hand, it helps to raise
awareness (Vie, 2014). For example, recent examples such as #metoo, #blacklivesmatter, and #neveragain have helped to raise the
awareness of sexual assault, police brutality, and gun violence respectively. On the other hand, scholars are labeling it as slacktivism.
Slacktivism refers to political actions which pose a minimal cost to participants but do not have a real-life impact (Morozov, 2009).
This term is now used in a negative sense to belittle online participation to express support of an issue (Christensen, 2011). Examples of
slacktivism in online contexts include liking or sharing a post on social media, or joining an online group. Slacktivism has been viewed
as low-key and serves the purpose to make people feel good (Chiluwa & Ifukor 2015). Some even argue that slacktivism hinders real
activism and civic engagement through the mechanism of moral balancing, where people choose not to take real-life actions as they
already performed a low-cost action online (Lee & Hsieh, 2013). We argue that hashtag activism constitutes its own spectrum in which
there might be slacktivism.

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2.1. Connective action and networked publics

Hashtag activism has been analyzed through the lens of the connective action, a framework that theorizes individuals’ digital
actions and impacts in the context of an online social movement (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). The framework of connective action
argues that geographically distributed Internet users participate in digital activism through self-motivation and personalized actions
about contentious issues without the need for the intermediation of traditional and formal brick and mortar organizations (Bennett and
Segerberg, 2012). It uncovers how a social movement is being organized and coordinated through mediated communication to
facilitate public engagement (Bennett et al., 2014; Mercea & Funk, 2016). One area of inquiry that has received more scholarly
attention is how counterpublics use social media to raise the awareness of issues advocated and obtain legitimacy (Chan, 2018; Wang
and Chu, 2019). As a part of connective action effort, hashtag activism is not necessarily a catalyst for political revolutions (Fuchs,
2012); rather it contributes to social movements through the culture of autonomy, as self-organized participants transition from the
expression of outrage to hope (Castells, 2012). Hashtag activism also helps with the agenda-setting (i.e. informing the public what to
pay attention to) (Dessewffy & Nagy, 2016; Wang et al., 2016).
In the social media environment, hashtag activism essentially is a network of participants that used the same hashtag to engage in
information sharing (Wang et al., 2016). Counterpublics stand in contrast to mainstream narratives of a social issue and often utilize
social media to form networks and gain legitimacy. One way through which counterpublics form network connections is retweeting
(Lotan et al., 2011). Retweeting occurs where an original tweet is forwarded by a user to his or her followers. Because of its popularity,
Twitter added a feature in 2009 to allow users to easily retweet with one-click (Suh et al., 2010). The action of retweeting can be
combined with a comment to the original post. Retweets are easily identifiable on Twitter by the string “RT @” followed by the name of
the source of the text. It entails an acknowledgment that the original tweet contains valuable information. It contributes to “a
conversational ecology in which conversations are composed of a public interplay of voices that give rise to an emotional sense of
shared conversational context” (Boyd, 2010, p. 1).
As reported by Poell and Borra (2012) in their case study of #g20report tweets, the retweets constituted more than half of the total
tweets on each of the observation days. Starbird and Palen (2012) studied the tweets related to the 2011 Egyptian political uprisings
and concluded that activists used retweeting as a network strategy to process information, recommend and filter relevant messages to
supporters. Analyzing retweeting networks in hashtag activism helps to uncover the most shared content and the prominent voice of
the counterpublics, who rise to challenge mainstream or elite narratives (Jackson and Foucault Welles, 2015, 2016). Furthermore, the
application of the connective action framework will help identify specific strategies the counterpublics employ in sharing activism
information.
Existing literature on hashtag activism often centers on either on people (i.e. activists) or content (i.e. hashtags or topics). For
example, researchers have examined the hashtag co-occurrence patterns and identified what types of hashtags are more likely to get
viral (Blevins et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2016). Others focus on identifying key actor types in the information flow (Lotan et al., 2011),
different roles activists played (Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013), and how serial activists across multiple social movements formed a
close community on Twitter (Wang et al., 2019). Few studies have examined both the activists and content together (Xu, 2020). This
study tackles the content and participants together through a network perspective. In doing so, we dive more deeply into the literature
to identify several information sharing mechanisms underlying the emergence of a connective action facilitated by the use of Twitter.
The co-examination of users and topics helps to unpack how a social movement was organized and coordinated on social media to
mobilize public attention and obtain legitimacy.

2.2. Three information sharing mechanisms underlying connective action

Social movements often face legitimacy challenges. The key is in identifying and mobilizing potential supporters (Bimber et al.,
2012). Social media can function as an echo chamber where counterpublics build a homogeneous opinion climate and facilitate
participation to support the cause (Shen et al., 2020). As argued in Mercea and Funk (2016, p. 295), “emergent loosely-coupled
networks of variegated groups and individuals are developing a growing capacity to communicate and cooperate in a distributed,
scalable and directed manner with ICTs”, thus calling for the analysis of the information sharing mechanisms at multiple levels to
achieve the coordination purposes. We propose the following three mechanisms at the levels of users and topics to examine strategies
used by Twitter users to build a collective agenda and mobilize attention.

2.2.1. Generative role taking

The first mechanism underlying information sharing is generative role taking to mobilize collective attention and reach a critical
mass. Generative role taking is conceptualized as a social media affordance that allows users to be autonomous and to participate in
decentralized conversations (Majchrzak et al., 2013). Given the assumption that connective action is driven mainly by self-motivated
activists, we would expect a degree of decentralization as participants voluntarily take initiatives to generate content relevant to the
collective goal and to keep the information flow going. This seems to counter the classic argument in the collective action literature
that more centralized networks could facilitate the achievement of common goals (Marwell & Oliver, 1993).
However, the generative role taking mechanism aligns well with the decentralized organizational structure identified in recent
examples of digital activism (Castells, 2012; Wang and Chu, 2019). Centralized structure of decision making emerges in social
movements and gets justified to achieve efficiency; yet they often result in political failure (Castells, 2012). Hashtag activism is formed
around multiple forms of networks that are leaderless. Digital platforms such as Twitter become “decisive tools for mobilizing, for
organizing, for deliberating, for coordinating and for deciding” (Castells, 2012, p. 257). With the use of hashtags, networked

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counterpublics develop shared practices to organize a leaderless movement through tweeting and retweeting, which enables a message
to grow its reach exponentially.
Several studies about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movements in the past decade have found that offline participation exhibited a
strong tendency toward decentralization but it was not entirely leaderless (Lee, 2015). Lin (2017) studied the Umbrella movement and
found that although the movement was organized in a decentralized manner, various people and organizations still served as soft
leaders who built up ad-hoc alliances to “form an assembly as a formal institution to incorporate inner differences and coordinate
collective actions” (p. 60). To further explore the general role taking mechanism, we ask,
RQ1: What characteristics define the organizational structure of online information sharing networks during the Hong Kong 2019
Protests?

2.2.2. Hashtag-based story telling

The second mechanism underlying information sharing and hashtag activism is the hashtag-based storytelling to raise awareness. In
connective action, Twitter users can incorporate individualized orientations in their narrative to express personal grievances and hopes
(Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). A significant number of studies have analyzed how counterpublics and marginalized groups con­
structed narratives and evidence about a controversial issue to achieve their collective goals. For example, Jackson and Foucault
Welles (2016) examined the #Ferguson Twitter network to capture the social media discourse of the shooting of the 18-year-old
Michael Brown in August 2014. Their analysis showed that the use of a common hashtag helped to provoke and shape public
debate about race, police brutality, and social justice. Clark-Parsons (2019s analyzed the #metoo movement to identify tactics used by
activists to increase the visibility of the movement. She found that the activists used Twitter to provide narratives about their indi­
vidual experience with oppression but also to scaling up from individual to collective visibility. She concluded that hashtag activism
helped activists “powerfully reclaim their agency and pushed back against discourses that normalize harassment and assault” (Clark-
Parsons, 2019, p. 16).
Studies on Hong Kong’s recent social movements have also identified evidence that activists used strategic framing to construct and
adjust their contentious discourses, and to achieve consensus and action mobilization (Zhou and Yang, 2018). In particular, Chan
(2018) offered an analysis of social media posts related to the jamming of the Hong Kong Police Force after the first anniversary of the
Umbrella Movement. He argued that social media platforms offer a space for activists to engage in discursive contestation and to
challenge the dominant discourse from mainstream media. We ask,
RQ2: What dominant issues are being addressed by the hashtag activists during the Hong Kong 2019 Protests?

2.2.3. Virality and diverse supporter base

The third mechanism underlying information sharing and hashtag activism is the emergence of viral information sharing networks that
span diverse supporters. Bimber et al. (2012) argued that the key challenge to achieving a collective goal in a mediated media envi­
ronment is identifying relevant others for support. In a mediated communication environment, information sharing entails multidi­
mensional social networks that include human actors and also nonhuman technological elements (Contractor et al., 2011). In hashtag
activism, this means a piece of information not only connects different users through their common interest (Wang and Chu, 2019) but
also connects people with different topic areas (Wang et al., 2016). The information sharing ties between human beings can be
examined with the degree of reach to diverse social groups. Nahon and Hemsley (2013) proposed the notion of virality to capture “a
social information flow process where many people simultaneously forward a specific information item, over a short period of time,
within their social networks, and where the message spreads beyond their own (social networks) to different, often distant networks,
resulting in a sharp acceleration in the number of people who are exposed to the message” (p. 16). The information sharing ties be­
tween human actors and content can be examined to capture the degree of issue alignment (Xu, 2020). Participants of hashtag activism
could hold diverse interests in mind. Aligning seemingly disconnected diverse issues in a common context helps create a sense of
shared identity and solidarity (Benford & Snow, 2000; Kuo, 2018; Xu, 2020). We examine the following research question:
RQ3: How do hashtag activists share information with each other to achieve issue alignment during the Hong Kong 2019 protests?

3. Method

We collected Twitter data using #HongKongPoliceBrutality from October 15, 2019, to January 30, 2020. This particular hashtag
was used to focus on the specific issue of police brutality among various ramifications of this movement. The reasons were twofold.
First, the police brutality issue is highly controversial. During the movement, protesters officially declared a demand to conduct an
independent inquiry into the alleged police brutality cases (Palmer, 2019). Up until now, neither the Chinese nor Hong Kong gov­
ernments have admitted to the wrongdoings of the police force in Hong Kong. Therefore, it could provide insights on what issues
around police brutality had been discussed by activists to advocate. Second, the issue of police brutality has been at the center of the
recent waves of protests in other countries (Jackson et al., 2020), which may offer a point for comparison as well as implications about
how activists can use social media to mobilize attention around the globe. What is worth noting is that despite the use of a single
hashtag, the sampled tweets included other key hashtags used by protesters, such as #standwithhongkong, #freehongkong, and
#SOSHK.
During the studied period, protestors and local citizens used Twitter to spread the news and mobilize resources, avoiding controlled
and censored social media platforms such as Sina Weibo since the 2014 Occupy Central protest (Cheung, 2018). The role of Twitter
during this local yet internationally prominent protest is well recognized (Ho, 2019; Quackenbush, 2019). This time frame was selected
due to the increasing number of media coverage about the tension between the protesters and the police after China’s 70th-anniversary

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parade. In total, 204,079 tweets were archived through an open-source data collection tool with Twitter Streaming API. Then, we used
these tweets’ unique IDs to extract relevant metadata from the official Twitter Search API, which yielded 185,959 tweets. We sampled
all the English tweets for further analysis (n = 137,580), in which 33,003 of them were original tweets. A lack of original content (24%)
suggests that there might be a group of active content generators and that slacktivism might be more prevalent.
Further data collection was conducted through the following procedure. First, the retweeting network was constructed to capture
the information sharing activities on Twitter from the person who sent the original tweet to the user who retweeted (Fig. 1). The
retweeting network was chosen as it represents message-motivated communication. Unlike a mention network which is driven by
actor-motivated communication, a retweeting network is more prone to a weak core-periphery structure (Yang & Saffer, 2020).
Furthermore, a mention network could sample nodes that did not engage in the network but happened to be tagged by others. The
retweeting network was directed and weighted, with direction indicating information flow and weight indicating how many times the
action of retweeting occurred between two users. The following network analyses used the largest weakly connected component of the
network for accurate and reliable measures. The retweet network consists of 36,413 nodes and 93,289 directed and weighted ties. The
retweeting frequency for each unique tweet was calculated to sort out the most popular tweets containing #HongKongPoliceBrutality.
Second, we extracted attribute data for all Twitter users in our dataset, including the number of followers, the number of followees, the
number of tweets, geolocation, and tenure (number of days since they joined Twitter).
To examine RQ1, we presented the general tweeting trend and the overall network structure to demonstrate the information flow
patterns. We also identified the most active hashtag activists from the dataset, defined by their outdegree and indegree centrality
scores. Given how the retweeting tie was constructed, the outdegree centrality captures the communication power a user has while the
indegree centrality captures the level of user initiative in driving the information sharing.
To answer RQ2, structural topic modeling was conducted in R to identify key topical clusters in the whole dataset, using the
following packages: topicmodels, tm, and tidytext. Structural topic modeling is a machine learning method for discovering system­
atically the thematic structure and linguistic context of large text data (Blei et al., 2003). An inductive qualitative coding of key terms
under each topic was conducted to provide a contextual interpretation. To answer RQ3, community detection was implemented in the
igraph package in R using random walk (Pons & Latapy, 2005). Given that retweeting activities could involve users from other sub­
communities after several rounds of information cascades, we limited our random walk steps to half of the network’s diameter (6.88)
and set it as 3. Furthermore, we conducted topic modeling again in R with the five largest subcommunities to examine issue alignment.
Visualization was produced in Gephi with a force-directed layout, with nodes sized according to the outdegree centrality (i.e. how
many times an account was retweeted) and colored based on their subcommunities.

4. Results

4.1. Overall tweeting traffic and network descriptives

As shown in Fig. 2, tweeting traffic through the study period showed that the use of #HongKongPoliceBrutality fluctuated from
mid-October 2019 to the end of January 2020, with two visible peaks around mid-November. As reported in mass media, several police
brutality related tragedies occurred in November, including a police officer shooting an unarmed university student, a student falling
from a building during the clashes between the police and the protesters, and the firing of tear gas by the police (the Guardian, 2019).
Therefore, the overall tweeting traffic (i.e. the number of tweets using this hashtag daily) coincided with the violence reports in the
mass media. Overall the tweeting activity using the hashtag slowed down since December 2019 but regained some momentum be­
tween mid-December and January 2020, possibly due to unprecedented electoral success of pro-democracy protesters and mass arrests
at local universities (Griffiths, 2019).
The retweet network was very sparse, with a density of 0.00007. This network feature is expected given the large network size.
Retweeting networks by nature are not evenly distributed but tend to cluster. For example, the most popular retweeting tie had a
weight of 100, indicating one user retweeted the other one’s tweets 100 times. The second most popular retweeting tie had a weight of
47. A closer look at the descriptive network features could offer insights into user dynamics and clustering patterns. On average, the
degree centrality counting in both indegree and outdegree centrality scores was 4.32 (Median = 1, SD = 50.30), i.e. the average number
of unique connections each account had from either retweeting or being retweeted. The weighted degree centrality refers to was 5.10
(Median = 1, SD = 61.86), which accounted for the total number of connections and also the repeated connections from the same
accounts. The average indegree centrality was 2.30 (Median = 1, SD = 4.77), and the average outdegree centrality was 2.30 (Median =
0, SD = 50.03), suggesting distinct patterns related to how users may vary in initiating and receiving retweeting ties. The average path
length among all of the nodes was 6.88, suggesting a fairly high possibility to reach each other. Given the large size of the network, the
diameter (i.e. the longest of all the computed shortest paths between all possible pairs of nodes in the network) was 17. The average
clustering coefficient was 0.02, which was relatively low.
As shown in Fig. 3, the retweeting frequency distribution of original tweets (n = 33003) roughly follows a power-law pattern, with
frequency ranging from 0 to 3,027 and the average retweeting frequency of 3.78 (S.D. = 53.89). Furthermore, we found that the
retweeting network has an indegree centralization of 0.01 and an outdegree centralization of 0.13. This indicates that Twitter users

Fig. 1. User A Retweets User B.

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Fig. 2. Tweeting Activity Using #HongKongPoliceBrutality By Days.

were more or less equally active (indicated by small SD in indegree centrality) in retweeting about the police brutality incidents on
Twitter, leading to a fairly decentralized structure of information flow. However, the outdegree centralization is much higher,
demonstrating that there is a core set of users whose tweets were frequently retweeted by others. This offers some evidence of
slacktivism as retweeting does not take the same effort as generating original content. It also suggests that the main goal these users
achieved was to distribute information to obtain legitimacy and raise awareness.

4.2. Top information generators and drivers

To uncover who helped to drive the retweeting network, we identified the top 500 users from two groups. We refer to them as top
information generators (users with the highest outdegree centrality) and top information drivers (users with the highest indegree cen­
trality). These two groups of top users represented a diverse pool of active participants. See Table 1 for a summary of descriptive
network statistics for both groups. Only 18 Twitter users appeared in both groups. For top information generators, their outdegree
centrality scores ranged from 18 to 4,717 (Mean = 163.66, SD = 422.02). Their indegree centrality scores ranged from 0 to 155 (Mean
= 4.87, SD = 11.49). Based on the descriptive summary of their user attributes, a typical information generator had been on Twitter for
775 days, had about 3901 followers, followed 1107 users, and had 4176 tweets in total (roughly 5 tweets a day). Among these in­
formation generators, 351 reported their location at Hong Kong, 33 in the United States, 15 in Europe (9 in the United Kingdom, 2 in
Spain, 2 in the Netherlands, 1 in Germany, and 1 in Italy), 2 in Canada, 2 in Japan, 2 in Taiwan, 1 in Vietnam, and 1 in Argentina. 89
did not disclose their location. It was worth noting that the account with the highest outdegree centrality was from the Director of the
Christian Defense Coalition based in Washington DC. Some other notable accounts included students from the Chinese University of
Hong Kong and self-identified activists based in Hong Kong.

Fig. 3. Distribution of Retweeting Frequency Based on the Full Dataset.

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Table 1
Descriptive Attributes of Top Influencers.
Top Information Generators Top Information Drivers

User attribute Mean S.D. Minimum Maximum Mean S.D. Minimum Maximum

Tenure 749.88 1024.06 55 3864 775.07 1102.56 56 4426

Number of followers 976.44 1586.63 3 19,964 3900.92 16558.93 0 176,571
Number of followees 1090.49 1264.66 0 6747 1107.15 4075.90 0 1408
Number of tweets 19351.50 44398.07 413 786,284 4176.22 14380.07 3 237,061
Indegree centrality 4.87 11.49 0 155 32.55 20.98 19 237
Outdegree centrality 163.66 422.02 18 4717 5.61 51.35 0 1106
Betweenness centrality 103782.70 561673.91 0 10534040.30 18498.47 330281.82 0 7360306.32
Closeness centrality 0.39 0.32 0.09 1 0.13 0.31 0 1
Eigenvector centrality 0.01 0.03 0 0.18 0.06 0.10 0 0.86

For top information drivers, their indegree centrality scores ranged from 19 to 237 (Mean = 32.55, SD = 20.98). Their outdegree
centrality scores ranged from 0 to 1106 (Mean = 5.61, SD = 51.35). A typical influencer in the retweeting network had been on Twitter
for 750 days, had about 976 followers on Twitter while following over 1000 Twitter accounts, and had been actively tweeting 19,352
tweets (an average of 26 tweets a day). Out of these top information drivers, 292 of them reported that they were located in Hong Kong,
19 were in the United States, 4 in Europe (2 in the United Kingdom and 1 in Germany, 1 in France), 4 in Canada, 4 in Australia, 2 in
Vietnam, 1 in Japan, and 1 in Taiwan. 173 of these users did not report their locations. Some notable accounts included Hong Kong
expats located in Australia, Canada, and Germany, and an French official in New Caledonia.
To answer RQ1, participants using #HongKongPoliceBrutality took initiatives in distributing information using a common hashtag;
while at the same time they engaged in retweeting activities to develop a more centralized network of information distribution. As
shown in Table 1, top information drivers had higher eigenvector centrality scores, which indicates that they are connected with other
more active users in the information sharing network. Among the most influential information generators, the majority of them re­
ported being in Hong Kong (70%) with a relatively large fan base. But their geographic locations spanned across different continents
(including 3% in Europe and 7% in North America). Their brokerage roles were further supported by their higher betweenness
centrality scores, indicating that they are more likely to bridge along the shortest paths between other users. The active retweeting of
more popular content helped to sustain the conversation across different regions and facilitated the distribution of key information
such as people’s anger and evidence of police brutality. This mix of decentralized information generation and centralized information
aggregation contributes to the emergence of connective action.

4.3. General topics identified

Topic modeling was conducted with the most frequently retweeted tweets to identify what major issues were discussed on Twitter
by the hashtag activists. This allowed us to have a more focused analysis of what topics were more likely to obtain public attention,
measured by retweeting frequency. The corpus was built by taking top 500 tweets, removing special symbols and stop words in En­
glish. The top 500 tweets showed a wide range of frequency scores, ranging from 24 to 3027. We followed the Latent Dirichlet
Allocation (LDA) algorithm (Blei et al., 2003), which is a widely accepted unsupervised approach. A challenge in topic modeling is the
selection of an appropriate number of topics for a given corpus. In the context of the current study, the number indicates how many
dimensions (i.e. topic vectors) we want to associate each tweet with. As explained in Greene, O’Callaghan, and Cunningham (2014),
choosing too few topics will produce results that are overly broad; while choosing too many topics will result in over-clustering (i.e. the
text data will be grouped into many small, highly similar topics). To better capture the results, we conducted LDA with 3, 5, and 10
topics and reported the findings from 5 topic vectors due to its higher clarity of emerging themes.
To answer RQ2, several topics attracted the most traffic through retweeting. First, hashtag activists used Twitter to document ev­
idence related to police brutality, such as sending videos and describing what force the police used. They also highlighted the victims

Table 2
Keywords From Each Topic, Based on the Top500 Retweets.
Topic Number Keywords

1 Documenting Arrest*, protester*, attack, people, student*, stand, video, cannon, live, spray, god, beat, pray, press, spread, bullets, mask, civilian,
Evidence democracy, daily, injured, legal, support, falling, just, sheung, campus
2 Calling for help Police, human, journalism, group, force, china, university, kids, prevent, english, government, actions, excessive, state, youngsters, boy,
hkpf, illegal, immediately, restaurant, vehicle, accused, affected, assemble, ccp, chan
3 Tension Man, unarmed, riot, gun, water, pepper, chinese, facebook, photo, today, please, forget, rally, polyu, violence, reason, point, days, groud,
nov, stop, aider, hand, murder, peaceful, retweet, shame, tonight, female, fireman, frontline
4 Weapons and Tools Tear, gas, shot, young, citizens, head, fired, freedom, mosque, back, reporter, insane, ridiculous, suddenly, abuse, cuhk, move, protect,
baton*, maltreating
5 Expression of Standing, truth, breaking, car, cops, evidence, professional, range, rights, forcibly, heartbreaking, humanitarian, hkpolice, lawyer,
feelings acceptable, minimum, stop, totally, crowd, dioxin

Note: Stars denote stemmed words. Words ordered by topic probability.

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being protesters and in particular students. Key terms included arrest, attack, spray, video, bullets, and beat. 30.44% of the sampled
tweets were categorized into this topic. Second, they called for journalists and the western world for help, by asking people to tweet in
English and calling police brutality explicitly illegal. Key terms included journalists, prevent, please, and illegal. About 14.89% of the
sampled tweets fell into this topic. Third, they highlighted the tension between the peaceful actions of unarmed protesters and the
violence exhibited by the police. In particular, they tended to describe real-time events and breaking news. Key terms included un­
armed, riot, rally, reason, violence, murder, peaceful, and shame. 20% of the sampled tweets were focused on this topic. Fourth, the
hashtag activists focused on identifying specific weapons and tools the police used, including tear gas, gun, and baton, etc. About 16.89%
of the sampled tweets were about this topic. Key terms included tear gas, head, fired, face, shoot, abuse, attack, baton, crying, and
pepper spray. The last topic was about expressing feelings that police brutality is heartbreaking, not acceptable, and against humanity.
Key terms included standing, kill, forcibly, heartbreaking, humanitarian, and stop. About 17.78% of the sampled tweets were about
this topic. See Table 2 for more keywords identified from each topic.

4.4. Issue alignment within and across subcommunities

Given the large size of the network, community detection results identified over 70 subcommunities with a modularity score of
0.43. Each subcommunity is identified by clustering a group of users that retweeted each other more frequently. The visualization of
the retweeting network was presented by month in Fig. 4a-4d, with nodes sized by their degree centrality and colored by their sub­
community affiliations. Therefore, bigger nodes indicate a higher frequency of being retweeted by other users. The visualization
showed a clear cliquey structure in information sharing over time, further prompting us to examine specific patterns across and within

Fig. 4. (a). Visualization of the Retweeting Network Using #HongKongPoliceBrutality, October 2019. Note. Colors of the nodes indicate the groups
each node can be assigned to based on their positions in the network. All the nodes were seized by their degree centrality: nodes with higher degree
centrality scores were sized bigger. (b). Visualization of the Retweeting Network Using #HongKongPoliceBrutality, November 2019. (c). Visualization of
the Retweeting Network Using #HongKongPoliceBrutality, December 2019. (d). Visualization of the Retweeting Network Using #HongKongPoliceBrutality,
January 2020.

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R. Wang and A. Zhou Telematics and Informatics 61 (2021) 101600

Fig. 4. (continued).

the subcommunities. It also showed that several key users remained central over time.
Given the large variance in modularity size (Fig. 5), we focused on the five largest subcommunities to examine whether each
subcommunity built its own narrative and how aligned their narratives were. The largest subcommunity had 4,467 users, with an
average of 8.23 unweighted degree centrality, an average of 9.91 weighted degree centrality, and an average ego clustering coefficient
of 0.09. The second largest subcommunity had 1,573 users, with an average of 4.36 unweighted degree centrality, an average of 6.75
weighted degree centrality, and an average ego clustering coefficient of 0.46. The third largest subcommunity had 516 users, with an
average of 3.27 unweighted degree centrality, an average of 3.57 weighted degree centrality, and an average ego clustering coefficient
of 0.14. The fourth largest subcommunity had 505 users, with an average of 2.41 unweighted degree centrality, an average of 2.50
weighted degree centrality, and an average ego clustering coefficient of 0.41. The fifth largest subcommunity had 429 users, with an
average of 2.28 unweighted degree centrality, an average of 2.32 weighted degree centrality, and an average ego clustering coefficient
of 0.03.
Topic modeling was conducted within each subcommunity setting the topic vector as 3. Given the nature of the network ties and
how people were partitioned through the modularity analysis, being in the same subcommunity would indicate that members were
frequently retweeting the same set of tweets to be connected. Therefore, we discuss issue alignment across the subcommunities and
also unique topics each of them covered to answer RQ3.
As reported in Table 3, the main issues aligned across all the subcommunities include documenting evidence of police brutality
(topic1 from the main themes identified in RQ2), calling for journalists and the outside world for help (topic 2 from RQ2), and
specifying weapons and tools used (topic 4 in RQ2). They also expressed concerns about young citizens and teenagers being affected in
the protests and used the hashtag to report breaking news. Several subcommunities developed their own narratives. Subcommunity 1
used Twitter to report breaking news such as shots fired and the use of tear gas. Subcommunity 2 focused on locations where there
might be risks such as restaurants and plazas. Subcommunity 3 reported university incidents and asked the police brutality to stop.
Subcommunity 4 focused on details such as planes flying over during protests and protesters being held as hostages. Subcommunity 5
called for the world to listen to the protesters. Therefore, we argue that hashtag activists engaged in unified storytelling by forming

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R. Wang and A. Zhou Telematics and Informatics 61 (2021) 101600

Fig. 4. (continued).

smaller cliques and developed their narrative strategies to help grow the information sharing network.

5. Discussion

This study applies the framework of connective action and network analysis to analyze the information sharing among hashtag
activists. It presents a case study of the 2019 Hong Kong protest to uncover under what conditions hashtag activism could be viewed as
a form of connection action where activists use strategies to distribute information and build momentum. The network approach
allows us to examine users and content at the same time to identify three mechanisms underlying the movement: generative role-
taking, hashtag based storytelling, and issue alignment among diverse social groups. Combining descriptive network analysis,
modularity analysis, and topic modeling, we demonstrated that hashtag activists during the Hong Kong protests used different stra­
tegies of information sharing to drive the movement. We discuss the main findings in this section.

5.1. Decentralized information sharing, issue alignment, and centralized mobilization

To begin with, we found a mix of decentralized information sharing and centralized information aggregation among the activists
who used #HongKongPoliceBrutality. As found in the existing literature, activists are self-organized and form a leaderless network of
distributing information (Castells, 2012). The nuance revealed in this paper is that hashtag activists engage in generative role taking to
not only generate information but also to build a collective agenda by making certain messages more viral. The top information drivers
actively retweeted content to a larger fan base across different regions of the world to help grow the network of supporters. In other
words, they developed a strategy of connective action by two channels: decentralization of information generation from both Hong

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R. Wang and A. Zhou Telematics and Informatics 61 (2021) 101600

Fig. 4. (continued).

Kong and other parts of the world to sustain the growth of the network and centralized mobilization to form a collective narrative.
Second, this study revealed several major themes hashtag activists addressed on Twitter. Topic modeling with the most frequently
retweeted content showed that activists focused on multiple issues which were connected through a common concern, i.e. police
brutality during peaceful protests. In particular, they utilized Twitter as a platform to document evidence, ask for outside assistance,
highlight the tension between protesters and the police, detail weapons and tools used in incidents, and express anger and fear.
Consistent with the literature, we found that hashtag activists engaged in active storytelling by taking pictures and uploading videos
and using tactics such as showing sentiments (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012).
Third, the analysis allowed us to examine Twitter content and users together and to investigate whether issues were aligned within
and across subcommunities of supporters. The connections examined through a network perspective were established when the ac­
tivists retweeted the same content. Therefore, the nature of the tie entails the alignment of issues people paid attention to. The results
from the clustered topic modeling showed that the most populated subcommunities were formed around collective issues such as
documenting evidence and seeking outside support. They also each took on distinct roles such as reporting breaking news, raising the
awareness of the young generation (particularly college students) being affected by police brutality, and calling for the government to
listen to their voice.

5.2. Moving from slacktivism to connective action

The literature on digital activism has long debated the role of social media in influencing collective action and social movement. At
the center of the debate is the notion of slacktivism which entails that online actions related to activism only serve the purpose of
making people feel good (Chiluwa & Ifukor 2015). Social media are not a revolutionary space for social change, as their roles are
contingent on how the technological architectures are utilized to advocate for a collective agenda and mobilize public attention. We
discuss our findings to answer the overarching question: how do counterpublics engage in information sharing on social media to
mobilize support and move beyond slacktivism toward connective action?
To begin with, our findings are consistent with the literature that generative role taking through decentralized information sharing

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Fig. 5. The Distribution of Group Sizes Identified Modularity Classes. Note. Subcommunities of more than 100 members were shown in the
distribution.

Table 3
Topics Identified from Top 5 Subcommunities.
Keywords under Topic1 Keywords under Topic2 Keywords under Topic3

Community1 Arrested, protester*, people, video,
student*, treats, photo, violence, young,
teenager
Community2 Arrested, protester*, gun, world, speak,
restaurant, people, town, plaza, photo
Community3 Student*, arrested, people, university,
poly, gun, citizen*, stay, thinking, minute
Community4 Hongkong, arrested, protester*, world,
speak, happening, photo, silent, plane,
flying
Community5 Police, arrested, video, tear, citizen*, gun,
stopped, removed, guy, lawyer
Police, hongkong, citizen*,man, gun, pepper, head,
press, spray, force
Hongkong, tear, police, violence, citizen*, gas,
brutality, revolution, stop, government
Police, protester*, control, demonstrators, front*,
officers, weapon, long, range, Irad (a medical center in
HK)
Police, citizen*, gun, pointing, terrioets, surrounding,
hostages, holding, using, video
Hongkong, breaking, happening, student, couldn*,
speak, weapon, state, treat*, protester*
Tear, gas, shot, fired, please, tonight, hit,
daily, forget, journalists
Today, beaten, daily, china, imagine,
man, tonight, hit, journalist, head
Hongkong, tear, gas, please, stop,
brutality, speak, shot, happen,
government
Breaking, student, tear, cover, gas, bed,
mattress, bulletscour, people, head
Protester*, world, photo, spread, public,
generally, liv*, take*, control, listening

Note: Stars denote stemmed words. Words ordered by topic probability.

and centralized information aggregation can facilitate the formation of a collective agenda. As argued in Jackson and Foucault Welles
(2015), counterpublics often engage in decentralized individual tweeting while at the same time conduct collective hijacking of
mainstream media agenda, resulting in a spontaneous strategic effort to build a networked narrative. Castells (2012) argued that recent
social movements are often leaderless as activists engage in coordination and interaction without formal decision-making processes,
challenging the mainstream media’s storytelling which tends to portray the faces of collective action. The findings from this study
showed that activists took initiatives in coordinating their actions to build a collective narrative and to mobilize more supporters.
The literature on digital activism views slacktivism as the main challenge, which could be attributed to lack of engagement or low
effort to contribute to a collective endeavor (George and Leidner, 2019). Simplifying posting about a social movement on Twitter does
not necessarily translate into actual support or engagement. Therefore, we analyzed what the content was about, and how Twitter
users formed cliques to facilitate the reach of the content. The results from this current study showed that self-organized activists
during the Hong Kong 2019 protests actively engaged in driving the conversation and used different strategies to identify collective
issues. For example, they used Twitter to document photos and videos that recorded police brutality evidence. They expressed their
anger and fear to the outside world to raise awareness of the issue. These viral messages were spread across the global stage. The
unified storytelling from the identified subcommunities in the retweeting network suggests that the activists were successful in driving
the connective action through the use of hashtags, and issue alignment techniques, leading to the emergence of connective action.

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5.3. Limitations and future research

This study has several limitations that warrant further investigation. First, this case study drew Twitter data from a single popular
hashtag in the 2019 Hong Kong protest. The conflicting narratives from the protesters and the government offer a context of coun­
terpublics and digital activism. During the 2019 protests, more social issues emerged. The sampling in this study led to the inclusion of
other key hashtags used in the social movement (e.g., #StandWithHongKong, #SOSHKers, #HKHumanRightsandDemocracyAct, and
#HongKongProstests). However, the dataset may not be representative of the overall movement, which included five main requests.
We call for further investigation of these mechanisms in other contexts related to the Hong Kong protests to explore how topics and
especially counter-narratives travel in Twitter networks and how the Twitter network evolve over time as the dominant narratives are
established. Furthermore, the findings related to this particular case should not be generalized to other social movements easily. We
thus call for social movement scholars to replicate the analytical approach and test the key mechanisms laid out in this study.
Second, this study lacked an analysis across offline and online engagement, partly due to large missing data on user geolocation.
Geolocation data rely on the user’s self-reporting and it is not mandatory by Twitter. Missing geolocation data have been a challenge in
social media research. Users that choose to disclose their geolocation might show distinct demographic characteristics compared to
those who do not (Sloan & Morgan, 2015). In digital activism, the choice of not reporting geolocation might be related to privacy and
safety concerns. We call for future research to develop content-coding strategies to assist with geolocation identification and examine
the diversity of hashtag activists and how online participation and offline engagement may have influenced each other. Furthermore,
in-depth interviews with activists based in Hong Kong and other locations can help unpack whether they differ in engagement and
opinions.
Third, this current analysis relied on all the raw words used by the activists. Future research could examine how the use of different
hashtags influences the growth of the information sharing network by uncovering the co-occurrence patterns across social groups.
Hashtags may possess more narrative power compared to other words used in tweeting (Yang, 2016). The co-occurrence patterns of
hashtag use can help identify further dynamics the activists engaged in to mobilize attention toward a networked social movement
(Wang et al., 2016).
Furthermore, the current study only analyzed English tweets due to the application of the monolingual topic modeling method.
This decision was made for two reasons. First, Twitter was primarily used by activists to mobilize attention from the western world.
Second, topic modeling cannot accurately analyze the structures of theme-aligned multilingual text data, because in multilingual
corpora two related words in different languages rarely get grouped into a single topic (Vulić et al., 2015). All the raw tweets collected
in the current study included multiple languages (e.g., traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean). We call for
future research to investigate emerging topics under each language and evaluate the issue alignments within language-specific
audiences.

6. Conclusion

In the social media era, we increasingly witness the rise of large-scale social movements that have a blend of both offline and online
engagement. The literature has debated whether hashtag activism is meaningless or could help drive connective action that allows
activists to use customized strategies and form connective action. Guided by this debate, this current study identifies three mechanisms
underlying information sharing: generative role taking to mobilize collective attention and reach a critical mass, hashtag based sto­
rytelling to raise awareness, and building viral information sharing networks to attract diverse supporters. With data collected from the
Hong Kong 2019 protests, this paper empirically tested these mechanisms.
This study makes several contributions to the literature on hashtag activism and connective action. First, it combines the analysis at
both the user level and the content level analysis to identify and empirically test the mechanisms underlying the emergence of con­
nective action and social movement. This approach allows the examination of how activists coordinate among each other to generate
and disseminate what information to build a collective agenda. Second, the use of mixed methods (i.e. network analysis and topic
modeling) helped unpack different roles Twitter users may play in connective action. It provides evidence about how to differentiate
slacktivism and activism when analyzing digital social movement data. Third, it also demonstrates how self-organized activists used
strategies to co-construct meaning about a social movement to move beyond the expression of outrage and build a subcommunity for
further advocacy.
To further the inquiry into connective action, we call for future research to explore how stories are strategically selected and
elevated in digital network contexts, and what roles different users play. For example, given the informal organization taking place in
digital activism, how does informal leadership emerge in the frame of connective action, and how do brokers in the network bridge
different subcommunities and/or different topics? The differentiation offered in this study about information generators and infor­
mation drivers is worth further investigation. Future research can employ qualitative interviews with key participants to examine how
the topic diversity among these two groups may differ, what role technology diversity and censorship play in connective action, and
what communication strategies (e.g. the use of a single framing or multiple frames) are used by each group to frame the collective
agenda. It will offer insights regarding the strategic planning underlying the activism activities.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.

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R. Wang and A. Zhou Telematics and Informatics 61 (2021) 101600

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