Student-Athletes’ Organization of Activism at the University of Missouri: Resource Mobilization on Twitter

Abstract

Although social media has been increasingly noted as an outlet for athletes to openly address social issues, there has been very little systematic examination on the organizational capacity of social media. To address this, our study seeks to focus on the strike organized by the football players through Twitter at the University of Missouri in 2015. Specifically, it adopts the theoretical framework of resource mobilization and conducts a comprehensive analysis composed of two parts. First, by identifying geographic characteristics and participant groups for #ConcernedStudent1950, it seeks to reveal the mobilization scope and impact. Second, a social network analysis is used to delineate the organizational dynamics of the players’ protest networks. The results yield both theoretical and practical implications for athletes’ engagement in social activism in the digital era.

Thinking Twice Before You Post: Issues Student‐Athletes Face on Social Media

“…In recent years, social media has become a forum for activism, and student‐athletes participate in this behavior as well (Yan, Pegoraro, & Watanabe, ). For example, in 2015, football players at the University of Missouri, indicated they would not play again until university leadership was changed (Frederick, Sanderson, & Schlereth, ).…”

#Antivaccination on Instagram: A Computational Analysis of Hashtag Activism through Photos and Public Responses

“…Jackson and Welles [ 47 ] analyzed the network of retweets and mentions with the #Ferguson hashtag on Twitter and found that the network was a broadcast network, where a small number of influential users transmit messages to the vast majority of users unilaterally. Yan et al [ 48 ] also analyzed the network of retweets and mentions on Twitter to reach similar results, revealing that the #ConcernedStudent1950 hashtag network has evolved to be highly concentrated. Wang et al [ 49 ] paid attention to the hashtag co-occurrence network; their analysis of tweets with #OccupyWallStreet revealed that the role of hashtags in information virality may vary with the context of the tweets.…”

#ODU2ODU: Testing the Benefits of a Partnership Between Sport Management Classrooms

“…However, Twitter has a high appeal among sport fans (Burns, 2014), as through a live feed of comments, Twitter serves as a simultaneous shared experience with people all over the world (Harrington, Highfield, & Bruns, 2012). It has also been explored in depth by sport scholars interested in the nexus between the passion of sport and the instantaneity of the microblogging site (Li et al, 2019;O'Hallarn et al, 2019;Yan, Pegoraro, & Watanabe, 2018).…”