Potnis, D. Horne, B., Tahamtan, I. (under review) Hashtags for gatekeeping of users and COVID-19-related information on Twitter. International Journal of Information Management Data Insights.

This manuscript represents networks of over 10 million tweets by 3.1 million unique Twitter users to explain how and why (a) gatekeepers in the offline world leverage hashtags for replicating their authority and control information on Twitter, (b) hashtags help users alleviate the negative consequences of the information overload on Twitter, and (c) hashtags serve as an effective means to understand and explain crisis communication on Twitter. This manuscript establishes a theoretical relationship between data science and information science.