#StopAsianHate as Hashtag Activism: Provocateurs, Celebrities, and Fan Practices of Collective Action Against Racism

The #StopAsianHate hashtag movement emerged as a challenge to the rising tide of racism in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic and contributed to the legislation of the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act. Our research brings together concepts from social movement studies as well as network science and celebrity-fandom studies to examine a corpus of tweets about the movement. We employ a mixed-methods design combining structural topic modeling with digital discourse analysis. Even though the movement rose up against White Supremacist structural racism, we find that right-wing provocateurs with large followings often hijacked its hashtags to amplify sporadic Black-on-Asian violence. But the active participation of Asian celebrities such as BTS, with their own huge followings online, bolstered the movement. Their posts and statements about anti-Asian violence were heavily reposted and dominated the digital discourse. Crucially, we show how their fans helped boost the movement’s anti-racist agenda by repeatedly posting similar messages in concert, which we compare with the offline fan practice of “chanting” as a form of collective identity performance. While theories like the logic of connective action view digital activism as individualized and decentralized, our research elucidates its hierarchical structure and the oversized role of provocateurs and celebrities in raising the visibility of competing claims and agendas by re-contextualizing hashtags. At the same time, culture industries and practices can create bottom-up solidarities that can have a political impact by raising particular agendas in the digital attention economy.