Social media - Twitter hashtags in particular - can lead to changes in the real world, researchers who analyzed the effects of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement reported.
According to the research team headed by Deen Freelon at the American University School of Communication's Center for Media & Social Impact (CMSI), the BLM movement, which aims to increase awareness about police brutality against African-Americans with the hopes of ending it, has been driven forward mainly with the help of social media over the past two years.
To better understand how BLM utilized social media to advance its cause in 2014 and 2015, Freelon and fellow researchers, Charlton. D. McIlwaine, of New York University, and Meredith D. Clark, of the University of North Texas, analyzed 40.8 million tweets, more than 100,000 web links and 40 interviews with activists directly involved with BLM and allies of the movement.
The team found that the #Blacklivesmatter hashtag, which began in the summer of 2013, did not gain much traction until after the protests in Ferguson started in August 2014. Other hashtags that were linked to the movement, such as #HandsUpDontShoot and #Justice4All, were also not widely used in the beginning.
The team specifically found that the hashtag #Blacklivesmatter started to become increasingly popular after Nov. 24 when the St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCullough revealed that the grand jury chose not to indict police officer Darren Wilson. Wilson had fatally shot African-American teenager Michael Brown.
On that day, the number of tweets that included the hashtag totaled 103,319, which was more than four times the amount that was used on the day before. The researchers concluded that these tweets were largely responsible for making the Brown case a national issue as opposed to a state one.
"BLM hubs were successful in projecting their anti-brutality messages through various nonactivist networks; in criticizing the media harshly for their portrayal of anti-black police brutality; and in educating some audiences rather than simply preaching to the choir," the report wrote. "This report showcases how Black Lives Matter and related movements have used social media tools to broaden conversations about the general capacity of online media tools to facilitate social and political change."
The report added that through tweets and other social media platforms, the movement was able to spread its messages without the use of mainstream news outlets. These messages, which presented viewpoints about police brutality that were different from the press, managed to affect a wide group of people across the country.
