Mauna Kea Hashtags Around the Globe

Civil Beat maps 3,810 geotagged tweets over the course of a single month.

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#MaunaKea has gone global.

In the past few months, the hashtags #MaunaKea, #WeAreMaunaKea, #TMTShutdown and #WeSupportTMT, have been tweeted or Instagramed thousands of times from dozens of countries, some as far away as Iran, Japan and Indonesia.

Protesting through social media is a clearly 21st century way of opposing the $1.4 billion telescope that is being constructed on Mauna Kea. The project has been portrayed as disrespectful to Native Hawaiians who consider the mountain sacred.

Civil Beat mapped 3,810 geotagged tweets that were posted in the last month. Each point on the map represents a tweet. The points on the map are color coded, depending on whether they use #MaunaKea, #WeAreMaunaKea, #WeSupportTMT or  #TMTShutdown.

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