#Ferguson is everywhere: initiators in emerging counterpublic networks

ABSTRACT

On the afternoon of 9 August 2014, 18-year-old Michael ‘Mike’ Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri. Brown's body lay in the street for four and a half hours, and during that time, his neighbors and friends took to social media to express fear, confusion, and outrage. We locate early tweets about Ferguson and the use of the hashtag #Ferguson at the center of a counterpublic network that provoked and shaped public debates about race, policing, governance, and justice. Extending theory on networked publics, we examine how everyday citizens, followed by activists and journalists, influenced the #Ferguson Twitter network with a focus on emergent counterpublic structure and discursive strategy. We stress the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative methods to identify early initiators of online dissent and story framing. We argue that initiators and their discursive contributions are often missed by methods that collapse longitudinal network data into a single snapshot rather than investigating the dynamic emergence of crowdsourced elites over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media activism
• networked counterpublics
• network analysis
• discourse analysis
• policing
• Ferguson

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Alan Mislove for providing us with the data used in this research, and for Devin Gaffney's assistance with preparing the data for analysis. We also appreciate the assistance of Sonia Banaszczyk in preparing this text. We thank members of the Ferguson network whose tireless civic engagement made this research and a blooming national conversation possible. An earlier version of this analysis was performed using Twitter data given to the authors by R-Sheif, a non-profit organization dedicated to archiving and sharing social media data to support open learning and scholarship (http://r-shief.org). Although we did not ultimately use those data in our final analysis, we are grateful for the data gift that inspired our early thinking on this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sarah J. Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University where she studies how national debates about race, gender, and social change evolve in the public sphere. Jackson's book Black celebrity, racial politics, and the press: Framing dissent (Routledge, 2014) considers the role of African-American celebrities in shaping political debates about race and protest in both the black and mainstream press. She is the PI of an interdisciplinary team researching identity and hashtag activism. She serves on the associate board of editors for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. [email: [email protected]]

Brooke Foucault Welles is an Assistant Professor in the department of Communication Studies and a faculty affiliate of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. Foucault Welles’ studies how social networks shape and constrain human behavior, with a particular emphasis on how people come to recognize resources within their social networks and leverage them to achieve personal, educational, social and political goals. Her work is published in a number of interdisciplinary journals, including The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and Big Data and Society, and she is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Web Science. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. This, in fact, was always the case; Habermas’ idealized French salons were not a place of sweeping social inclusion.

2. The standard sample rate for the streaming API is 1% of all tweets. However, Twitter grants access to a 10% sample (sometimes called the 'garden hose') on a case-by-case basis. Our data were obtained through an individually negotiated 10% stream.

3. Mentions and retweets were counted separately in this analysis and normalized by the total number of tweets per day. Tweets containing both a mention and a retweet are counted in both columns. Tweets containing multiple mentions or multiple retweets were counted only once in the appropriate column. The tweet percentages for 9 August 2014 are somewhat lower than the rest because only 6 of 10 crowdsourced elites were discussing Ferguson, MO in the context of Michael Brown's death. Tweets related to the remaining 4 crowdsourced elites on that day were excluded.

4. Here, we draw on definitions of “mainstream” versus “counterpublic” membership that identify individuals and organizations based in dominant/powerful institutions and ways of knowing as “mainstream,” and individuals and organizations that seek to challenge dominant institutions and ways of knowing by reflecting the experiences of those without historical social power as “counterpublic” (Squires, 2007). As has always been the case, the possibility exists for particular individuals, for example Wesley Lowery a reporter for the Washington Post, to be both a part of the mainstream public sphere (via his professional affiliation) and counterpublic sphere (given his identity and attempts at integrating counterpublic narratives into the mainstream vis-à-vis his professional affiliation).

5. The demographic characteristics (including race/age/gender) of Twitter users described throughout this analysis were primarily determined through an examination of self-descriptors in Twitter bios, biographies available elsewhere online (including Instagram, blogs, and personal/professional websites), and other available identity indicators (for example, self-identification w/in Tweet text, in other public forums, and ‘selfies’ on social media accounts).

6. Brown was a recent high school graduate who had turned 18 two months before.

7. The term 'sundown town' refers to the historical exclusion of non-whites, particularly African-Americans, from living and residing in thousands of towns across the United States, as designated by signs at city limits warning African-Americans to keep out after dusk. While such overt exclusion was challenged by the Civil Rights Act in 1968, these practices have continued to shape demographics (and community relations, and law enforcement) of cities like Ferguson, a former sundown town where the proportion of African-American residents made up two-thirds of the population in 2010 (up from 25% in just two decades) (US Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, 2015).

8. The US Department of Justice's (2015) report on the Ferguson Police Department uncovered a long-running pattern of disregard for due process and unconstitutional violations, including 'stops without reasonable suspicion and arrests without probable cause in violation of the Fourth Amendment; infringement on free expression, as well as retaliation for protected expression, in violation of the First Amendment; and excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment' (p. 3).

9. #BlackLivesMatter is a US-based movement calling for an end to racialized police brutality. The hashtag was first used by activists Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Travyon Martin, and spread widely once it was used in conjunction with tweets about the events in Ferguson, MO.

10. 'Doxxing' refers to releasing personal identifying information on the Internet.