Temporal Evolution of Communication Networks in Social Movements: Evidence from the Movember Health Campaign on Twitter

Information System research has shown an increasing interest in the study of social media as tools for organizing and coordinating social movements. Studies find that online communication networks are instrumental in social media-enabled social movements. Yet, little is known about the temporal evolution of such networks. This research-in-progress fills this research gap by exploring how online communication networks unfold in online social movements campaigns. Specifically, it proposes a conceptual framework to study the evolution of the campaigns’ networks by looking at network structure and content. This study features an analysis of the Movember health campaign on Twitter and uses various methods to analyze Twitter trace data over time. Preliminary findings from the temporal analyses reveal that online social movements campaigns appear as hybrid forms of collective and connective action. Our future work will be developing a process model explaining networks’ evolution in online collective actio