#Indigenous: A Technical and Decolonial Analysis of Activist Uses of Hashtags Across Social Movements

Abstract

A mixed methods network analysis of the content, circulation, and amount of data Native American activists circulated through Twitter during the 2016 US presidential election reveals contours of the technical challenges and social and political boundaries shaping Native American political life. A comparison of the results with a mainstream American dataset reveals how tweets propagated by Native American rights activists are characteristically more likely to focus on life-and-death issues. Analysis of the findings from an Indigenous perspective opens possibilities for considering activist, scientific, experiential, technical, governmental, political, and metaphysical aspects of Indigenous Internet research.

Keywords

• Indigenous peoples
• social media
• Internet studies
• social computing
• methodology
• social movements
• social network analysis