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social sciences
Article
Digital Prospects of the Contemporary Feminist Movement for
Dialogue and International Mobilization: A Case Study of the
25 November Twitter Conversation
Ainara Larrondo Ureta 1, *, Julen Orbegozo Terradillos 2 and Jordi Morales i Gras 2

1 Journalism Department, University of the Basque Country, 48940 Leioa, Spain

2 Audiovisual Communication and Advertising Department, University of the Basque Country,
48940 Leioa, Spain; [email protected] (J.O.T.); [email protected] (J.M.iG.)
* Correspondence: [email protected]

Abstract: The feminist movement is experiencing the rise of a new generation characterized by
specific phenomena linked to technological progress, such as hashtivism, i.e., mobilization through
social media. With the aim of contributing to extending our knowledge of the implications of Twitter
for this as well as other social movements, this article examined eight of the most common Spanish-
and English-language hashtags used to commemorate the 25 November 2018 event, the International
Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. Employing big data analysis to study social
and communications phenomena, the results offer a picture of contemporary feminism through the
kind of international digital dialogue or conversation that it creates, as well as questioning Twitter’s



validity in terms of cohesion when it comes to uniting forces in relation to one of the movement’s


most urgent struggles: eliminating violence against women in all its forms.
Citation: Larrondo Ureta, Ainara,
Julen Orbegozo Terradillos, and Jordi
Keywords: gender violence; 25 November; feminism; Twitter; hashtivism
Morales i Gras. 2021. Digital
Prospects of the Contemporary
Feminist Movement for Dialogue and
International Mobilization: A Case
1. Introduction
Study of the 25 November Twitter
Conversation. Social Sciences 10: 84. The rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s offered the feminist movement a new way
https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10030084 to express itself, in addition to using traditional mass media, and it was at this time that the
foundations of “cyberfeminism” (Wilding 1998; Pozner 2003; Kelly 2005; Sánchez-Duarte
Academic Editor: Nigel Parton and Fernández-Romero 2017) and a new, fourth wave of feminism (Munro 2013; Lane 2015)
were laid. Through cyberfeminism, the movement is participating in the technological
Received: 26 January 2021 transformation that contemporary society is experiencing. As Locke et al. (2018) pointed
Accepted: 13 February 2021 out, “cyberspace is a gendered space (...) as readers and scholars, we may argue that this
Published: 2 March 2021 space provides a fourth way of feminist practice (...) we may envisage the online space as a
potential utopian postfeminist one in which we share, queer and make radically different
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral interpretations”. The movement’s organization within the context of the Internet implies a
with regard to jurisdictional claims in particular kind of activism as well as new ideas and practices linked to issues of gender,
published maps and institutional affil- participation and collective identity.
iations.
As well as indicating the differences in collective identity between feminist activists
offline and online, Michael Ayers (2003) showed that not all social movements work in
the same way in cyberspace and that feminism, in its form known as “cyberfeminism”,
demonstrates major benefits. More specifically, this author highlighted cyberfeminism’s
Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. advantage in promoting the feminist movement’s collective approach and emotionality,
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. by reshaping it in terms of community and solidarity, beyond individualism and self-
This article is an open access article awareness.
distributed under the terms and The presence of feminism on the Internet situates this social and political movement
conditions of the Creative Commons
at the cusp of a new cycle that promises greater opportunities in terms of promoting a
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
freer solidarity among women. After all, the interactive potential of the online context is
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
much more favourable than the offline one in terms of the establishment of action networks
4.0/).

Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, 84. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10030084 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci

Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, 84 2 of 13

aiming to expand feminist activism. As Ting Liu (2008) explained, stronger cooperation
among different feminist groups plays an important part in enhancing broader public
involvement and the power of civil society in terms of women-related issues.
Following this moment of cultural and social progress, achieved with the rise of the In-
ternet in the early 1990s, the consolidation of social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.)
around 2004 represented an additional stage of social struggle, to the extent that visibility,
mediated through social media, became a decisive instrument of our era for the articula-
tion and development of the efforts of social and political movements (Downing 2001;
Thompson 2005; Earl and Kimport 2011; Bruns et al. 2015).
Social media have become representatives of a social reality that lends itself to analysis
from different disciplines within the social sciences—sociology, psychology and social
communication among others—as well as from different perspectives, including the gender
perspective, constantly being renewed through feminist theory and praxis (Baer 2016;
Gill 2016; Stubbs-Richardson et al. 2018).
In fact, the feminist movement is even more present and active in social media than
in the offline world. In this offline context, the feminist movement has historically had
to fight for visibility. This visibility has been excessively dependent on the kind of rep-
resentation offered by the media, which are particularly interested in concentrating the
focus of public opinion on feminists’ more sensationalist and seditious acts, rather than
on their demands for equality. As different studies have shown, media representations of
the main feminist waves of the last century—the suffragette movement in the early 1900s
(Cancian and Ross 1981; Gamson and Wolfsfeld 1993) and the women’s liberation wave of
the sixties and seventies (Cancian and Ross 1981; Huddy 1997; Bradley 2003)—contributed
to their public definition in contradictory terms, as a subversive and circumstantial move-
ment, linked to achieving specific goals, and in certain contexts were also linked to left-wing
political struggles, as happened in Spain during the pre-democratic period (Larrondo 2019).
It can also be understood that social media contribute to destigmatizing the term
“feminism”, and furthermore, that the liberty in terms of expression and relations offered
by social media cannot easily be countered (Shulevitz and Traister 2014) by the effects
of certain media messages that distort or minimize the feminist feeling within society
(Kitzinger 2000; Roate 2015), as has occurred during other historical periods.
After a loss of mobilization potential in the last three decades (Schneider 1988;
Epstein 2002), this fourth feminist wave has been favoured by technological advances
represented by networking services such as Twitter. The strength of this networked com-
munity is found in the possibilities that such services offer for a freer expression that allows
many individual voices to participate in a dialogue with each other and construct collective
subjects based on particular campaigns or hashtags.
From a strictly methodological point of view, the analyses of feminist presence in
social media, which have a clearly interdisciplinary nature, have shown a preference for
the microblogging medium Twitter because of its greater impact and influence on the
opinion of a broad public (Murthy 2010). Considering this use of Twitter as a tool for social
analysis, it is important to bear in mind that research carried out until now has prioritized
qualitative analysis of both the content of tweets with the presence of certain keywords
and of the discussion promoted by these tweets, systematized based on the use of hashtags;
this has generally been undertaken with the goal of determining the capacity for influence
(indegree influence) and the dissemination or viralization (retweets) of messages.
However, feminist and gender research is making an effort to go further and focus on
the parameters that go beyond influence as measured in numbers of followers and retweets,
because in a hyperconnected interactive world, social activism is above all a conversation
or a dialogue. Different contributions have drawn attention to this need for progress
in feminist studies of Twitter (Baer 2016; Sánchez-Duarte and Fernández-Romero 2017;
Stubbs-Richardson et al. 2018; Turley and Fisher 2018), given the usefulness of this network
to “disseminate feminist ideas, shape new discourses, connect different and diverse groups
and allow new and creative forms of protest and activism (...)” (Locke et al. 2018).
Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, 84 3 of 13

With this in mind, this study contributes an analysis of the dialogues or interactions
among different groups based on variables that demonstrate a particular interest in the
feminist movement (Baer 2016; Boyd and Ellison 2007). We refer to the use of hashtags not
only as a cohesive element and one that builds community, but also as something that can
promote the independence/autonomy of the movement (denesting)—a circumstance that
has hardly been studied up until now (Fotopoulou 2014).

2. Research on hashtag feminism

In theory, the concept of hashtag feminism has created a virtual space where victims
of inequality can coexist together in a space that acknowledges their pain, narrative and
isolation (Dixon 2014).
What has been called feminist hashtivism has become representative of the kind of
activist struggle that characterizes this fourth feminist wave of our times. As Kitsy
Dixon (2014) explained, we are seeing a new wave of feminism that operates by hash
tagging. Hashtag feminism is being used “to rise above the limitations not only of women’s
mobility, but the limitations of being a feminist.” It demonstrates its usefulness in forming
communities for women who are seeking a place to express their beliefs, globally, with
other women who share in their social identity. “However, as this online community is
formed, questions of safe spaces, identity, and the redefining of feminism accommodate
the mass popularity of feminist hash tagging” (Dixon 2014).
In her work, Taryn Riera (2015) discussed how online feminist communities are
communities of validation and support, entities that allow them to do activist work by
helping young women to feel affirmed in their beliefs: “They offer respite when daily
marginalization, both online and off, takes its toll. Although it shares these functions with
the way feminism has historically taken place offline, online communities of validation
and support reach women who are not encompassed by physical-world feminist networks,
and its translation occurs through memes and other Internet artifacts”.
The #MeToo phenomenon is paradigmatic of this new women’s movement of a post-
feminist kind. It can be understood as a symbol of generational renewal (Gillis et al. 2004),
a change that has led to a more collective feminist feeling (Budgeon 2001; Braithwaite
2002; McDuffie and Ames 2021) but which applies, more than ever, the feminist maxim that
“the personal is political”, transcending the individual subject in order to build a shared
subject of struggle. #MeToo was one of the first digital challenges to consider whether
“sisterhood” had finally gone global or whether it was just another product of neoliberal
feminism (Ghadery 2019).
In any case, as Anabel Quan-Haase et al. (2021) pointed out, beyond #MeToo there
is a need for more cross-cultural analysis in order to gain a better understanding of the
movement as it evolves over time and moves into different spaces.
In fact, the complexity that online feminist activism covers in practice is one of the
main reasons for continuing the recent line of analysis of feminist hashtags. The usefulness
of studies into certain feminist hashtags has been demonstrated by Mendes et al. (2018),
who stated that these “provide some significant insights into the promise of digital feminist
activism for raising feminist consciousness and producing solidarity”. The present study
also aims to contribute to this line of research into what is known as feminist hashtivism by
considering factors that influence this solidarity.
As well as the analytical work on rape culture tweets by Megan Stubbs-Richardson
et al. (2018), especially relevant in this field are those studies which look into the useful-
ness of feminist hashtags for creating mobilizing conversations and promoting certain
constructions and resisting others. This area has become central in terms of researching
the online feminist movement from different perspectives, as is shown by the special issue
“Feminisms and Social Media” of the journal Feminism and Psychology (Locke et al. 2018).
The academic literature has recently examined important occasional feminist cam-
paigns based on hashtags that have been trending topics and which, therefore, have
demonstrated a high mediatization impact for the movement: #YesAllWomen (Thrift 2014;
Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, 84 4 of 13

Jackson et al. 2018), #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen and #FemFuture (Loza 2014), #why-

Istayed (Clark 2016; Linabary et al. 2020), #iamafeminist (Jinsook 2017), #MeToo and
#BeenRapedNeverReported (Mendes et al. 2018). All these hashtags are representative
of the moment that feminism is going through, based on a “call-out culture” that reaches
broad sectors of society that are aware of a need for change; in other words, a “willing-
ness to engage with resistance and challenges to sexism, patriarchy and other forms of
oppression via feminist uptake of digital communication” (Mendes et al. 2018). In terms of
Twitter’s main advantages, the cited studies recognize its usefulness as a simple, free space
to communicate feminist points of view and connect with people with similar ideas.
This validity of Twitter has also been recognized particularly by one of the special
issues of the Feminist Media Studies journal covering the feminist struggle on Twitter and
the use of feminist hashtags against gender violence (Berridge and Portwood-Stacer 2015)
More recently, Jackson et al. (2018) have said that “feminist hashtags have been successful
in creating an easy-to-digest shorthand that speaks to complex concerns”, as is the case with
regard to violence against women. According to these authors, “these hashtags provide
a source of discursive and collective energy that catalyses both on and offline movement
work, leading to powerful cultural repercussions and yes, change”.
So, taking everything into consideration, feminist hashtags show both advantages and
disadvantages (McCafferty 2011; Shulevitz and Traister 2014; Stubbs-Richardson et al. 2018).
With regard to their usefulness in terms of their unifying effect, various critical voices
have suggested that the very ontology of virtual relationships hinders the creation of solid
organizational structures (McCafferty 2011), converting feminist messages into simple
echoes within a cloud of criss-crossing messages (Shulevitz and Traister 2014). There
are also those who consider that Twitter is a space that is inherently toxic and negative,
not only with regard to the feminist movement, but with regard to the female subject
(Shaw 2014; Jane 2017). As Dixon (2014) states, “in identifying online communities such as
Twitter [...] as safe spaces for expressing feminism [sic] views and politics, its ramifications
present dire consequences which lead to online harassment, hate speech, disagreements,
and a miscommunication in rhetoric. It is with these consequences that the academic
discourse becomes lost in transmitting the message of what feminism is and how feminists
are identified.”
Criticisms of Twitter also refer to the ephemeral nature of hashtags, although some of
them, despite being occasional, are able to offer an annual revision that allows important
gender matters to be reconsidered (Clark 2016; Jinsook 2017), as is the case with the
25 November day against sexist violence. According to a recent World Health Organization
report (World Health Organization WHO), about one in three (35%) women worldwide
have experienced either physical and/or sexual violence from an intimate partner, or sexual
violence at the hands of a non-partner in their lifetime. The fight against sexist violence
continues to be one of the main areas of struggle for the feminist movement, particularly in
certain socio-cultural contexts, such as the Spanish-speaking world.
Furthermore, this struggle is supported by other spheres, including academic research.
According to recent work by Mendes et al. (2018, p. 244), “while we are confident that
conversations around digital feminist activism against rape culture, sexism and harassment
will continue, we encourage researchers to continue to explore the experiences of those who
are participating in such initiatives, so we can understand the fuller picture and long-term
effects and impacts of such feminist activisms”.
In the specific case of feminist praxis in Spain, Sonia Núñez (2011), (Núñez et al. 2017)
has examined cyberfeminist virtual communities, including those created on Twitter
(Núñez et al. 2019). As these studies show, the use of new technologies has been decisive in
the promotion of increased socio-political mobilisation in the fight against violence against
women, as well as in the creation in this particular sphere of new relational spaces or online
groups. As well as examining the differences in how these online groups were created,
Núñez’s work shows how they define Spanish cyberactivist praxis from different positions.
Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, 84 5 of 13

Specifically, in their study into digital activism on Twitter against gender-based vio-
lence in connection to the 8 March 2017 feminist mobilization in Spain (8M), Núñez et al.
(2019) explored a sample of 20,000 messages (tweets, retweets and mentions) with the
most commonly used hashtags in this context, such as #8M and #NiUnaMenos (“Not
One [woman] Less”). As this work showed, giving testimony on gender-based violence
offers digital feminist activism the possibility of acting in an effective, political manner on
Twitter, circumventing invisibility. However, perhaps the most important thing that this
study showed, in agreement with our principal hypothesis, is that these hashtags do not
form strong conversational communities, but rather serve to disseminate messages at a
mass scale.
In other words, the most recent research on hashtag feminism confirms how the tweets
on women’s experiences in a form of “herstory”, together with the cultural climate created
as these women and their stories came together to join in social protest at a particular
moment, reinforce structures of feeling and collective commitments to this movement’s
issues (McDuffie and Ames 2021). However, it is not clear if those structures of feeling
and collective commitments are strong enough to promote or facilitate some type of
international dialogue and cohesion within the movement, an achievement that would be
revealed as one of the main potentialities of hashtag feminism on Twitter.
According to our study, the Twitter discourses of the agents representing the feminist
movement in English-language and Spanish-language contexts are different and, therefore,
so is the kind of hashtivist mobilization carried out in the two political–cultural contexts.
This is even the case with regard to activism with a strong intention to unite, such as that
related to 25 November International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
So, taking as a reference the dialogue generated on Twitter at the time as the annual
25 November commemoration in the year 2018, the article examines the usefulness and
value of hashtivism to the women’s movement according to the different political and cul-
tural contexts of the UK (Crozier-De Rosa 2018), representing the English-speaking world
and northern Europe, and the culture of Latin and Ibero-American influence represented
by Spain.
The approach, in terms of studying these differences, has been carried out based on
different research questions.
RQ1 Firstly, the text asks whether geographically distinct feminists enter into dialogue
on Twitter (interdiscursive cohesion level among group or individual accounts with a
significantly feminist character), that is to say, whether feminist dialogue on Twitter shows
an international dimension.
RQ2 The study also asks about the outstanding presence of other institutional and
non-institutional actors in the public space for dialogue that Twitter has become for the
feminist movement.
RQ3 A further aim has been to understand the presence and role of institutional femi-
nism at the international level in the feminist dialogue on Twitter related to 25 November
by means of an analysis of the role of the United Nations (UN) as an organization for
uniting shared struggles.
The article analyzes these matters through the specific prism of the social media
(Twitter), bearing in mind the importance granted by feminist-activist theorists to these
platforms due to their value in terms of boosting cyberfeminism around fundamental
matters such as gender violence. In this regard, the article tackles the implications of
Twitter relationships or dialogues for online feminist activism in terms of a more interactive
and social constructivist model of feminist (cyber)activism.

3. Data Extraction and Analysis Method

Structural analysis methods such as Social Network Analysis (SNA) have demon-
strated their capacity for the analysis of interactions on social media as a mixed methodol-
ogy, that is, both quantitative and qualitative (Crossley 2010; Edwards 2010; Tremayne 2014),
Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, 84 6 of 13

considering the possibility of articulating analytical strategies that combine mathematical

and computational rigour with interpretative skills characteristic of social theory.
Social media offer a large amount of data that can be easily computed as a matrix
of relationships (e.g., mentions among users, “friend” or “follower” relationships among
users or relations set up between users and content), and so the data extracted from social
media becomes a big data source through user–platform and user–user interactions (e.g.,
publications, mentions, likes, swipes or shares).
Specifically, our research focused on the microblogging social platform Twitter and was
carried out using the Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset, developed by the University of
Amsterdam’s Digital Methods Initiative (DMI-TCAT) (Borra and Rieder 2014). This has
been considered to be one of the most useful open Twitter analysis tools (Felt 2016) since it
permits the capture of a wide variety of information from the Twitter social networking
service in real time or retrospectively
This offers an unprecedented level of access to the store of online human activity over
time (Del Fresno-García 2014). After all, as pointed out above, Twitter makes it possible
to observe the social or interpersonal relationships that provide the connection between
individuals or organizations, that is, the forms in which actors are linked, which determines
the general structure of the network, its groups and the positions of the individual profiles
within it.
The use of the Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset made it possible to monitor the
flow of interactions on the Twitter social networking service and to download the data
regarding the following hashtags between 22 and 28 November 2018 (that is, from three
days before to three days after the 25 November commemoration): #25N; #25nfeminista;
#Diacontralaviolenciadegenero; #Iflovehurts; #Niunamas; #Stopviolenceagainstwomen;
#Violenciacontralamujer; #Whiteribbonday. Activity related to the following combinations
of words was also monitored, capturing any tweet that contained both concepts (not
necessarily in the following order): mujeres + violencia (Spanish); women + violence
(English); Noviembre + 25 (Spanish); November + 25 (English).
Using this protocol, a total of 881,887 tweets were captured around the world in
English and Spanish, in a conversation involving 473,157 unique users. These tweets
contained a total of 705,769 unique mentions among 439,859 unique users, which were
entered into the Gephi social network analysis software.
In order to facilitate viewing the network and the interpretation of the phenomenon
analysed (Venturini et al. 2019), the Force Atlas 2 (Jacomy et al. 2014) algorithm has also
been applied. This measures proximity between those nodes that have interacted, and
the distance between those that have not done so. In identifying communities, the role
of the analyst consists of interpreting the results of a process of grouping nodes based on
the patterns that the algorithm itself is autonomously able to identify in the data, using
software such as Gephi.
Bearing in mind the goals of this study, as well as the scientific context in which it
is set, the problem involved an exclusive methodological design, developed ad hoc to
examine this study’s specific problem. In order to identify the importance of users, their
“degree of entry” was taken; this is the number of times that each user is mentioned by
other users of the service. In order to identify the conversation that each user participated
in, the Louvain algorithm for community detection (Blondel et al. 2008) was applied.
Furthermore, in this study, the concept of social homophily takes on particular im-
portance; this is the tendency of individuals to relate more or have more relational links
with those who have similar social characteristics (Verd et al. 2014). Thus, in this study,
the “degree of intercommunity homophily” was identified for each pair of communities
using the E-I index (Krackhardt and Stern 1988). This index provides a figure between 0
and ±1, where a value of -1 indicates perfect homophily (users are only linked with actors
from their own community), a value of 0 indicates neutrality or indifference (users are
equally linked through nodes of their own community and those of the other) and a value
of 1 indicates perfect heterophily (users are only linked with users of the other community).
Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, 84 7 of 13

Given that the communities have been calculated using the Louvain Multilevel al-
gorithm which generates communities with homophilic criteria, the key point about this
last piece of evidence lies in seeing the differences between pairs of communities. In other
words, there is an examination of which pairs of communities are the least homophilic,
given that the occurrence of high or very high levels of intercommunity homophily were to
be expected.

4. Results
Looking at Twitter, a total of 11 communities were identified that contained over
2% of the service’s users or nodes. These included a total of 44.73% of the nodes. A
first result, then, was that over half of the network’s participants made their contribution
in small or isolated conversations (i.e., they constitute communities that include less
than 2% of users, involving very few interactions among very few users). This, in turn,
means a strong trend towards horizontality: the conversation’s leaders are not hegemonic,
but rather are diverse and have low shares of power. In short, what was found was
a highly dispersed conversation without a single discourse forming a backbone. The
communities with more than the 2% threshold of users are identified in Table 1 and Table
S1 (Supplementary Materials).

Table 1. Communities (clusters) detected according to the study’s hashtags.

Community No. Leader (Indegree) Topic

Institutional messages (UN) in English against the
Community 1 @un_women
different forms of violence against women
Community 2 @srtabebi Announcing demonstrations in Spanish cities
Community 3 @huelgafeminista Protests in Spain
Community 4 @onumujeresmx Protests in Mexico
Community 5 @luciarguezf Memes against gender violence
Institutional messages (UN) in Spanish against
Community 6 @onumujeres
the different forms of violence against women
Activism against violence against women in the
Community 7 @whiteribbonscot
English-speaking world
Poetry by Rafael Cabaliere (not related to the
Community 8 @botonica international day for the elimination of violence
against women)
Community 9 @uniciudadanaar Protests in Argentina
Community 10 @rubnpulido Far right in Spain
Community 11 @cupnacional Catalan separatism
Source: own elaboration.

When these communities were analysed one by one, based on their leaders and most
popular tweets, the main topics of conversation in each one were identified:
The first community was led by @un_women and offered various messages of an
institutional kind related to 25 November. The second community was led by the Spanish
activist Bebi Fernández, who stood out for her role in promoting feminist mobilization
related to 25 November in Spain. Along similar lines, the third community was led by
@huelgafeminista, in this case with an activist style and a goal of organized mobilization.
The UN’s account in Mexico led the fourth community, contributing to mobilization in the
Latin American sphere from an institutional point of view. The fifth community was led by
the athlete @luciarguezf, with fewer than a thousand followers. The community focused on
sharing memes or graphic content against gender violence. The sixth community was led by
a homonym of community number 1, the UN’s institutional profile in Spanish. The seventh
community @whiteribbonscot is an account that is the mouthpiece of a campaign to engage
men in bringing an end to sexist violence. The eighth community, led by @botonica, is the
most striking, since it is not an account that specifically covers matters related to violence
against women: this is an account that publishes poetry, which achieved a particular
engagement with the 25 November event. The ninth community is led by the account
Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, 84 8 of 13

@uniciudadanaar, closely linked to protests in Argentina, just as community number 3 is

related to protests in Spain. The tenth community was led by the account @rubnpulido,
with messages and topics related to the far right in Spain. The last community was led by
an account promoting Catalan independence @cupnacional.
These results indicate that 25 November created feminist mobilization and discourses
against gender violence from different perspectives, some of which are institutional and
some not, and some of which are alternative and some not, but bearing in mind that in all
cases this activism shows a certain degree of organization. Once the characteristics of each
community had been examined according to the accounts that lead each of them, the study
looked at the level of dialogue that was established among them. In each case, the aim was
to identify an approach in terms of the basic characteristics of each community or, where
appropriate, to identify certain differences with regard to its cause or justification in the
different features, viewpoints or even functions of each feminist community within the
movement’s debate and even within the social and political debate in which this movement
is embedded, in both theory and action.
The following graph (Figure 1) shows the interactions established among the conver-
sation’s participants: each user is a node and each mention between users is an edge. The
colours indicate the community concerned, whose names are written on the image and
in the tables. Likewise, in this graph it is possible to see some of the details set out in the
next double-entry or contingency table (Table S1—Supplementary Materials), particularly
the enormous disconnect among communities. We are looking at a conversation that has
very few points of connection among different communities, including those which seem
to have greater ideological or discursive proximity, as is the case of the communities led by
Protests in Mexico @onumujeresmx and Protests in Argentina @uniciuddadanaar, or the
case of @un_women and @onumujeres. On the other hand, the graph makes it possible to
see clearly the many and varied discursive leaderships established in relation to such
Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, x FOR PEER REVIEW an14
9 of
important commemoration.

Figure1.1.Interactions
Figure Interactionsand
anddialogue
dialoguerelated
relatedtoto#25N
#25N(2018).
(2018).Source:
Source:own
ownelaboration.
elaboration.

TableS2
Table S2(Supplementary
(SupplementaryMaterials)
Materials)shows
showsalmost
almostperfect
perfectlevels
levelsofofintercommunity
intercommunity
homophily(i.e.,
homophily (i.e.,close
closetoto -1).
-1). This
This is for
is for twotwo reasons:
reasons: thethe
firstfirst is that,
is that, as been
as has has been pointed
pointed out,
out,conversation
the the conversation is highly
is highly dispersed;
dispersed; the second
the second is thatisthe
that the Louvain
Louvain Multilevel
Multilevel algo-
algorithm
rithm identifies
identifies communities
communities using ausing a procedure
procedure that stimulates
that stimulates homophilic
homophilic grouping.
grouping. The
The aim,
then,
aim, is not is
then, tonot
show to that
showhomophily exists,exists,
that homophily since this derives
since from the
this derives very
from themethod used,
very method
but to identify
used, preciselyprecisely
but to identify which intersections between clusters
which intersections betweenhave the least
clusters havepronounced or
the least pro-
lowest
nounced homophily
or lowestvalues, that isvalues,
homophily to say, where
that is the homophily
to say, where the is less homophilic.
homophily is less homo-
philic.
In this way, it is possible to see that the intersection between the Protests in Spain
communities number 1 and 2 is the least homophilic, given the possibilities of homophily
described. The members of the Protests in Spain (1) community have also established a
Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, 84 9 of 13

In this way, it is possible to see that the intersection between the Protests in Spain
communities number 1 and 2 is the least homophilic, given the possibilities of homophily
described. The members of the Protests in Spain (1) community have also established
a significant number of interactions with users of the Memes and Protests in Argentina
communities. The members of the Protests in Spain community number 2 have interacted
with members of the Catalan-speaking community, the Onumujeres community, and also
with the clearly anti-feminist Spanish far right. This last connection makes clear that
interactions between communities can be established in negative or very negative terms
(insults, etc.). References with derogatory aims also occur. This means that the interactions
established are not necessarily positive.
Elsewhere, it is possible to find significant interactions between the clusters in English,
UN Women and Activism in English, revealing a linguistic homophily in the network.
Those accounts that speak the same language tend to communicate more among themselves,
although it is true that UN messages in English and in Spanish create certain common
interactions. Thus, connections exist between the Protests in Mexico and the Protests in
Spain communities, and the Protests in Spain and Protests in Argentina communities.
Finally, there are a number of communities that have slight interaction with the Memes
community, which are the Protests in Argentina, the Protests in Spain and the Poetry
communities, suggesting a certain synergy among native Twitter contents.

5. Discussion and Conclusions

It is possible to use the feminist demands made through the hashtivism generated on
Twitter around the 25 November 2018 commemorative day to characterize contemporary
feminism by the kind of digital dialogue or conversation it creates. In this regard, according
to the results obtained in this case study, today’s Internet feminism is not characterized
according to the features that have historically defined it in the offline sphere. Based on
the case analysed, Internet feminism has shown itself to be a movement uninfluenced by
major leaders or ideological reference points.
Furthermore, the study’s results call into question Twitter’s validity as a space for dia-
logue that can boost feminism as a movement for action in the streets, as well as its validity
as a tool that can unite and encourage greater cohesion among members and defenders at
an international level. This study, then, joins a new analytical framework in which various
analyses of what is known as “feminist hashtivism” question the phenomenon’s usefulness
for uniting a new generation of activist women as an intermediate step for achieving a
greater degree of mobilization and awareness with regard to the struggle for equality
(Fotopoulou 2014; Shulevitz and Traister 2014) at the international level.
In general terms, no clear or outstanding dialogue among feminist groups at the
international level was perceived, and even less so at the interlingual level (RQ1). A degree
of good practice, in terms of cohesion, can be observed among some groups internationally,
with a greater vitality within feminism in Spain and the Latin American world, shown by
the greater density of relationships among members of certain clusters despite the very
compartmentalized scenario. By contrast, in the English-speaking world, no particular
volume of similar activity or interactions was observed in any case. This may be due to the
tradition of Spanish feminism as a feminism that has come about based on the emergence
of different street and protest-based activist movements in the context of the post-Francoist
period and the transition to democracy, coinciding in time with the second feminist wave
of the 1970s (Women’s Liberation Movement).
Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind that in Spain feminism is going through
a period of energetic activity, among other things, due to the continuing existence of a
high incidence of violence against women (OECD 2019) and an adverse legal climate, as
demonstrated by the high-profile case of the gang rape of a young woman during the San
Fermín festival in Pamplona in 2016. This form of organizing in Spain, which revolves
around mobilization and street action, contrasts with the model in the English-speaking
Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, 84 10 of 13

world, where NGOs and lobbies aim to influence society by means of other models: specific
campaigns, raising awareness, small-scale protests, etc.
Feminism in the Spanish-speaking world, then, presents a more subversive character
that tends towards protest, unlike that in English-speaking countries where the struggle
for equality in relation to the 25 November event is channelled through associations and
organizations that are integrated into the structure of the social, political and cultural
system (RQ1).
The study has also shown how hashtivism increases the presence of non-institutional
actors in the public space (RQ2). In the Spanish case, this means the “digital supremacy”
of autonomous activist groups linked to the left wing. In the case of the United Kingdom,
this means NGOs and lobbies that work in favour of women’s rights, as well as other
similar initiatives of a more individualist–liberal kind than in the Spanish-speaking world
(e.g., men against abuse, women against female circumcision, etc.). This also shows a clear
absence of transnational activist cohesion. It is even possible to talk about the existence
of structural gaps between activists in different countries and different languages (e.g.,
activism in English and protests in Spain). Despite these differences, Twitter nonetheless
manages to be a channel of feminist dialogue through official mouthpieces such as the UN,
making it a kind of interlingual tool for dialogue on the Internet (RQ3).
With regard to the level and degree of homophily examined, there is a certain trend
towards linguistic homophily, as well as the use of certain codes or contents, specifically
memes, short sentences and protests. The element of interlingual cohesion is the UN and
not, curiously, the protests and memes—something that is certainly significant. In fact,
the most active feminism of the first and second waves was characterized by using street
protest, humour and satire in their public imagery and representations, etc.
Another of the main trends observed is the isolation of the far right, which is hardly
connected to any cluster apart from the Protests in Spain community number 2. This is
probably due to the “don’t feed the troll” maxim that is well known to hashtivists and
which produces highly differentiated group behaviours among antagonistic ideological
profiles.
In short, according to the general premise that has guided this research which defines
hashtivism as “activist efforts that take place online, or utilize online networks to promote
communication, action, or awareness” (Gunn 2015), the examined case shows the value
of online activism to promote collective solidarity, uniting the feminist movement around
one of its most important struggles: violence against women. At the same time, it is
effective when it comes to favouring or reinforcing its autonomy on both a macro level
(independence of the movement in relation to other movements and social, political,
economic or other influences) and a micro level (autonomy of the movement in relation
to the feminist struggle’s model, based on different cultural and political contexts, for
example English-language and Spanish-language feminism).
Even so, in line with previous research (Boyd and Ellison 2007; Page 2012), the results
obtained in this case study demonstrate how feminist hashtivism is limited in terms of
promoting a solid or strong sisterhood based on consistent dialogues. As results show, this
is something difficult to achieve due to the polarization and self-centred uses that Twitter’s
digital network promotes. Taking into account these constraints and the limitations of
this specific case study, in terms of future research lines it might be worth noting here
how feminist hashtivism will continue to be a front-line research topic to determine how
hashtags can help to promote global dialogue and subsequent online and offline action,
beyond its proven usefulness in promoting global communication, visibility and awareness
with respect to postfeminist causes.

Supplementary Materials: The following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/2076-076

0/10/3/84/s1, Table S1: Communities according to their leading accounts and main tweets. Table S2:
Level of connection between clusters and degree of intercommunity homophily.
Soc. Sci. 2021, 10, 84 11 of 13

Author Contributions: Conceptualization, A.L.U. and J.O.T.; methodology, A.L.U., J.O.T. and J.M.iG.;
software, J.M.iG.; validation, J.O.T. and J.M.iG.; formal analysis, A.L.U., J.O.T. and J.M.iG.; inves-
tigation, A.L.U., J.O.T. and J.M.iG.; resources, A.L.U., J.O.T. and J.M.iG.; data curation, J.O.T. and
J.M.iG.; writing—original draft preparation, A.L.U., J.O.T. and J.M.iG.; writing—review and editing,
A.L.U.; visualization, J.O.T. and J.M.iG.; project administration, A.L.U.; funding acquisition, A.L.U.
All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
Funding: Gureiker Research Group (IT1112-16).
Institutional Review Board Statement: Not applicable.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement: Not applicable.
Acknowledgments: This article is part of the scientific activities of ‘Gureiker’, a research group (A)
(Ref. IT1112-16) of the Basque University System (Journalism Department, Faculty of Social Sciences
and Communication of the University of the Basque Country), and of the Spanish Ministry project
entitled “News, networks and users in the hybrid media system” (Noticias, redes y usuarios en el
sistema híbrido de medios).
Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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