Key network disruptors: A structural analysis of the #DisruptJMM network influencers and actions

Twitter (now known as X) has been used by an active group of academic mathematics communities to connect and share ideas and information. Like many other Academic Twitter communities, conference hashtags have been widely used to share information between conference attendees and communicate new ideas presented at conferences to the broader academic community. However, in 2020, Dr. Piper Harris proposed a different kind of academic hashtag --- #DisruptJMM --- as a counternetwork hashtag to an in-person conference. This study looks at the use of this hashtag through and in between the 2020 and 2021 Joint Mathematics Meetings, which are advertised as the largest mathematics gatherings in the wold. Through qualitative coding, we investigate the many ways we can conceptualize and define ``influencers'' in this context. We find that some definitions consistently identify the same individuals as ``community organizers'', whereas some definitions of influencers allow us to identify alternative ways that individuals can influence the growth and propagation of hashtags. This study contributes to our understanding of the myriad ways that individuals can contribute to build hashtag movements that move between in-person and online spaces.