Abstract
The activity of the Facebook Group, "Join the Coffee Party Movement" (Coffee Party) is studied during a 7-month period leading up to and following the 2010 United States Midterm election. During this time, Coffee Party Facebook page administrators posted 872 parent posts that received 152,762 comments from group members. Utilizing our previously established method (Mascaro & Goggins, 2011) for extracting and analyzing electronic trace data, we constructed a weighted social network from the parent posts and associated comments. We measured network centralization and total post activity for the entire network and identified individuals with high betweenness centrality across three dimensions: 1) Time, 2) Parent Post Category and 3) Specific Parent Posts. We report three key findings. First, the structure, centralization and leadership within the network differ in four key time periods: the time preceding the midterm election, the week of the midterm election, the time immediately following the midterm election and the time period when the new Congress was sworn in. Second, the Coffee Party Administrators act as agenda setters with the parent posts, but show significant variation in their comment participation over time. Third, participants in the discourse alter their discourse role according to specific parent post and category. Our findings have implications for issue groups and candidates who utilize social media tools to mobilize support and engage with supporters.