BLMtwitter: The Black Lives Matter (BLM) Twitter Corpus

Abstract

In May 2020, the murder of George Floyd led to protests throughout the United States and around the world. Along with these protests, social media platforms saw a dramatic increase in the volume of discussion regarding Black Lives Matter (BLM). Two years on, online discussion of BLM continues to be lively, not just in the United States but also internationally. This paper introduces one of the most extensive collections of Black Lives Matter tweets available, covering from 2010 through May 2022 and including nearly 50 million tweets overall. Parallel corpora for All Lives Matter and Blue Lives matter are similarly collected. I describe the corpus construction process, including selection criteria for tweets using the BLM acronym. The paper provides a summary description of key dimensions of the three corpora, including patterns in tweet counts over time as well as the number of distinct users and the volume of tweets in languages other than English. The corpus is publicly available and updated regularly.

All Lives Matter discussions on Twitter: Varied use, prevalence, and interpretive repertoires

“…Since then, the phrase has come to be part of a global anti‐racism movement, particularly after the murder of George Floyd, another unarmed Black man in the USA. As well as large physical BLM protests across the USA and the world, the phrase BLM has also become prolific in online settings, for example, with above 40 million uses of the phrase on Twitter in the year from June 2014 to May 2015 (Freelon et al, 2016) and more recently, 49.6 million corpus tweets, that made direct reference to BLM (van der Veen, 2022). BLM, ‘the civil rights issue of our time’ (Holt & Sweitzer, 2020, p. 16), has therefore brought racism and anti‐racism clearly into public debate, with one feature of this being the use of alternative slogans and counternarratives in the form of All Lives Matter (ALM), Blue Lives Matter/Back the Blue, and White Lives Matter.…”