Ferguson and the death of Michael Brown on Twitter: #BlackLivesMatter, #TCOT, and the evolution of collective identities

ABSTRACT

Recent events related to police brutality and the evolution of #BlackLivesMatter provides an empirical case to explore the vitality of social media data for social movements and the evolution of collective identities. Social media data provide a portal into how organizing and communicating generate narratives that survive over time. We analyse 31.65 million tweets about Ferguson across four meaningful time periods: the death of Michael Brown, the non-indictment of police officer Darren Wilson, the Department of Justice report on Ferguson, and the one year aftermath of Brown’s death. Our analysis shows that #BlackLivesMatter evolved in concert with protests opposing police brutality occurring on the ground. We also show how #TCOT (Top Conservatives on Twitter) has operated as the primary counter narrative to #BlackLivesMatter. We conclude by discussing the implications our research has for the #BlackLivesMatter movement and increased political polarization following the election of Donald Trump.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• social movements
• social media
• #BlackLivesMatter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. This page provides a summary of articles juxtaposing All Lives Matter versus Black Lives Matter. Huffington Post (2016, January 14). Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/all-lives-matter/.

2. Our data include 8,307,857 tweets from 9 to 18 August 2014. The Wall Street Journal reported that 7.8 million “#Ferguson” tweets were sent during this time period (Zak 2014). The discrepancy may be the result of our broader search term “Ferguson” which includes “#Ferguson”. Similar to Driscoll and Walker (2014), we believe it is essential to document the particular details of how data were collected from Twitter in order to properly frame research findings. As a result, our data set (https://github.com/edsu/ferguson-analysis/blob/master/report.md) and processing code (http://github.com/edsu/ferguson-analysis) are available.

3. (2016, January 9). Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/WN/tcot-drives-tea-party-republican-message-social-media/story?id=11682222.

4. (2016, January 9). Retrieved from http://www.conservapedia.com/TCOT_Report.