How Cultural Environments Shape Online Sentiment Toward Social Movements: Place Character and Support for Feminism*

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between offline and online contexts in social movement discourse. We test whether local place character—the cultural reputations, values, and ideals associated with a particular location—predict support for feminism expressed on Twitter. Applying topic modeling to a unique corpus describing cities’ cultural reputations, we identify five cultural attributes of U.S. cities that constitute their place character. Then, we use these measures to predict the percentage of tweets that are positive toward feminism in each location. The results indicate that while social media may connect people from geographically distant areas, online discourse is still heavily influenced by the local spaces where users reside. Cities with a place character of Revitalization have more positive Twitter sentiment toward feminism, while areas known as Local Hubs for shopping and leisure are more negative. These findings contribute to social movement scholarship by highlighting one way that offline and online contexts are connected. Far from transcending local geographies, social movement discourse taking place online remains shaped by the cultural environment where it originates.