Digital Organizing and Emergent Collaboration on Twitter in Pursuit of Social Action

On the basis of a comparative case study of three social movements, #IceBucketChallenge, #BlackLivesMatter and #YesAllWomen, this paper explores how collaboration emerges online on Twitter. The study draws on organizing logics literature, research on online collaboration and online social network theories, combined with the analysis of tweets collected from days where the movements had high levels of activity. Drawing on the literature review, we derive a framework consisting of three organizing elements, structure, engagement and communicative content. These are used to analyze the distinctive characteristics of collaboration across the different cases. The article also identifies the distinctive features of the three online social movements at different levels of mobilization: the propagating movement, the coordinated movement and the co-creating movement. The study contributes to the understanding of distinctive features and organizing elements that lead to emergent collaboration in online social networks at different levels of mobilization."