title: Response to "Discourse over a contested technology on Twitter: A case study of hydraulic fracturing"-Word choice as political speech.
abstract: Hopke and Simis ( Public Understanding of Science, online 4 October 2015) find that #fracking, the most popular of five shale-related hashtags analyzed from a 2013 period, is associated with pro-shale attitudes only 13% of the time and note that the dominant voice of the activist community, coupled with a lack of engagement from industry, is unexpected. This comment offers additional perspective on the sentiment- and actor-skewed result by noting that the term "fracking" is highly political, specifically because the spelling "frack" versus "frac" is associated with activism. Furthermore, in public speech, the industry tends to deemphasize the hydraulic fracturing process in favor of the product, consistent with the findings that #natgas is a relatively pro-industry hashtag.
authors.affiliation: Stanford University, USA.
authors.forename: Emily
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Grubert
keywords: discourses of science; energy policy; environmental communications; interaction experts/public; media representations