Twitter and disability activism: leadership and relevant topics in the online conversation

The dissemination and viralization of information on social media has been widely studied from various perspectives, including that of digital activism. On the other hand, disability-related activism has conquered the online environment, thus obtaining a reach that goes beyond the offline space and generating dialogue in the digital sphere. This article analyses the conversation generated on Twitter, taking as a sample all the tweets with the #disability hashtag before and after the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. More than 18,000 tweets, containing almost as many mentions, were analysed and interpreted as the weighted edges of a graph created using Gephi software and applying the Force Atlas 2 brute force algorithm. The focus was placed on the conversational communities generated around that hashtag, their main themes and the prominent participants in them. In conclusion, although the network of mentions is very dispersed, Twitter is the setting for assertions that receive certain institutional and political support in the Latin American environment, for organisations related to the cause (such as the ONCE Foundation) and, above all, the clear predominance of female activists.