The Impact of Social Media on the Black Lives Matter Movement

Abstract

Counter-narratives can be powerful tools to oppose dominant beliefs, but they are not powerful enough; people tend to interact with like-minded others. This paper investigates the Black Lives Matter movement and its counter-protests on Twitter by adopting event detection, stance classification, and network analysis methods. Additionally, 11 case studies are provided to analyze the interaction of the three social movements with important and hot social or racial incidents. This paper analyzes online discourse: processed raw tweets containing either the movement’s hashtags or keywords related to the movement and its counter-protests on Twitter between 2013 and 2020, and network data: the follower IDs and the friends IDs of a sample of Twitter users. Black Lives Matter (BLM) gains wide attention to protest against police brutality and racially-motivated incidents, advocating that Black lives and indigenous lives matter. Social media activism has been increasingly popular in recent years with the rise of social media popularity. For social movements (SMs), social media could act as a platform to gain attention and push events to national headlines, making the movements last longer and potentially achieve their goals. However, SMs have also faced challenges with their presence on social media. For example, they risk putting their goals, organizing strategies, and personal safety in danger. Moreover, SMs have to deal with the divide in argument between them and the opposition by trying to shape social and political incidents differently. On the other hand, for counter protests, they introduce a new narrative that diverges the ideology and tactics of the recorded protests, diverting attention away from the event's original goals.

Keywords :Black Lives Matter, social media activism, counter-protests, racial incidents, network analysis, online discourse, police brutality, social movements.