Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Public Relations Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pubrev Hashtag activism and message frames among social movement organizations: Semantic network analysis and thematic analysis of Twitter during the #MeToo movement Ying Xiong, Moonhee Cho ⁎ , Brandon Boatwright School of Advertising and Public Relations, College of Communication and Information, University of Tennessee, 476 Communications Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-0332, United States ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Social movement organization (SMO) #MeToo Hashtag activism Feminism Activism ABSTRACT During the #MeToo movement, social movement organizations (SMOs) played a crucial role in the online mobilization by utilizing various message frames and appealing hashtags during the social movement. Applying a co-creational approach and using framing as a theoretical frame- work, the study explored how SMOs use words and hashtags to participate in the #MeToo movement through Twitter. Based on both semantic network analysis and thematic analysis methods, findings of the study enhance literature of social movement organizations and activism as well as provide practical implications for effective social movement campaigns. 1. Introduction Thousands of social movement organizations (SMOs) have advocated for various causes including endangered species, climate change, clean water, feminism, and equality, among others. Through both formal and informal communication channels, SMOs mobilize and unite individuals to pursue or resist social change (Edwards & McCarthy, 2004; Sommerfeldt & Yang, 2017). The success of such organizations is contingent upon their ability to connect with and motivate people to act. However, due to a general lack of a centralized structure and scarcity of resources, SMOs have leveraged online platforms to reach their salient publics in a cost-effective manner (Allagui & Breslow, 2016; Ihator, 2001; Martino & Lovari, 2016; Taylor, Kent, & White, 2001). Indeed, advances in digital communication technologies have enabled many local social movement campaigns to break geographic boundaries to reach broad audiences. The present study examines the role SMOs play on social media platforms – specifically, Twitter – to create shared meaning with audiences in an effort to spur action during the #MeToo movement. Research on SMOs can be traced back to public relations scholarship in the late 1980s. Grunig’s (1989) situational theory, for example, outlined publics’ capacity to become activist groups that might pose challenges to organizational autonomy. Consequently, much of the extant research on activist groups has been largely conducted from the corporate perspective which characterizes such groups as antagonistic at worst or organizational apologists at best. For more than two decades, public relations scholars largely ignored the strategic communication capacity of activist groups working to build support for causes among various publics. More recent efforts, however, have begun to acknowledge SMOs as a driving force for mobilization and social change (e.g., Earl, 2015; Wolf, 2018). An emerging line of research centers around ‘hashtag activism’ (cf., Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Cumberbatch & Trujillo-Pagán, 2016; Jackson, 2016; Khoja-Moolji, 2015; Kim, 2013; Yang, 2016), which has been defined as the “act of fighting for or supporting a cause https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2018.10.014 Received 12 May 2018; Received in revised form 25 October 2018; Accepted 25 October 2018 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: yxiong7@vols.utk.edu (Y. Xiong), mcho4@utk.edu (M. Cho), bboatwr1@vols.utk.edu (B. Boatwright). Public Relations Review xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0363-8111/ © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Xiong, Y., Public Relations Review, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2018.10.014