Social Media Framing of the Dakota Access Pipeline
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Abstract
Objectives The purpose of this research is to identify and understand the social media framing of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The DAPL is in North Dakota, crossing .55 miles north of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Primary criticisms raised through the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux tribes’ lawsuit of the DAPL are grounded in violations of the Clean Water Act (CWA) and the Rivers and Harbors Act (RHA) and the federal authorization given to Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) to allow the DAPL to discharge into the waters of the Cannonball River. Within the United States, Native American reservations are known to have high levels of poverty and face some of the worst environmental problems (Bullard, 2003). Newspaper articles about the DAPL that are published on the social media site Facebook, will be analyzed to understand how the media "framed" the DAPL, and to examine the responses to this framing. Methods This is a multi-stage mixed method research design. The first stage of the project begins with the selection of newspapers on Facebook, and how many posts they have made in relation to the DAPL on their Facebook pages. These newspapers are near the DAPL and were split into two tiers. The first tier consists of smaller, more local newspapers such as the Bismarck Tribune and the Native American press the Cherokee Phoenix. The second tier consists of the Chicago Tribune and the Native American press Indian Country Today, which are the larger, more nationally known newspapers. Due to the amount of content shared by the Bismarck Tribune and Indian Country Today, I have selected a timeframe window of the most posts, from September 2016 to March 2017 which includes key dates of DAPL events and the bulk of news stories. All of the posts from the Chicago Tribune and Cherokee Phoenix occur in this time span.The second stage of the research consists of locating the Facebook pages of the newspaper agencies and collecting all the posts they have made in relation to the DAPL, the reactions to the posts, the number of shares of each posting, and a content analysis of the post. The third stage is the content analysis of the newspaper articles. I analyzed the posting comments by the newspaper and the article and title. This analysis leads to the development of codes and themes and provides an understanding of how the newspapers have framed the DAPL.The last stage of the research is the quantitative analysis with SPSS of the Facebook emotional reactions and the amount of shares the articles received. The primary objective is to determine which themes received the most or least reactions/shares, which reactions are most/least popular for each newspaper and their audience, and which themes are more prominent within each newspaper. Results This analysis provides a sociological understanding of the DAPL and protests, the political conversation, and the political social consciousness of the United States. The initial appropriate themes to emerge from the analysis are environmental racism and eco-feminism, as the DAPL is an environmental issue and known feminists have come out in support of the anti-DAPL movement, such as Shailene Woodley and Jill Stein. Through the content analysis, other codes emerged consisting of Tribal Rights, Discussion of Protestors positively and negatively, and Native Unity. Through the statistical analysis, significant correlations were found, including the newspapers dates and specific emotional reactions, specific frames and sub-frames within the newspaper articles and receiving specific emotional reactions, and frames within the Bismarck Tribune and Indian Country Today receive more attention on Facebook than other frames and newspaper articles.