Divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter

Abstract

Since the shooting of Black teenager Michael Brown by White police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, the protest hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has amplified critiques of extrajudicial killings of Black Americans. In response to #BlackLivesMatter, other Twitter users have adopted #AllLivesMatter, a counter-protest hashtag whose content argues that equal attention should be given to all lives regardless of race. Through a multi-level analysis of over 860,000 tweets, we study how these protests and counter-protests diverge by quantifying aspects of their discourse. We find that #AllLivesMatter facilitates opposition between #BlackLivesMatter and hashtags such as #PoliceLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter in such a way that historically echoes the tension between Black protesters and law enforcement. In addition, we show that a significant portion of #AllLivesMatter use stems from hijacking by #BlackLivesMatter advocates. Beyond simply injecting #AllLivesMatter with #BlackLivesMatter content, these hijackers use the hashtag to directly confront the counter-protest notion of “All lives matter.” Our findings suggest that Black Lives Matter movement was able to grow, exhibit diverse conversations, and avoid derailment on social media by making discussion of counter-protest opinions a central topic of #AllLivesMatter, rather than the movement itself.

Yet We Live, Strive, and Succeed: Using Photovoice to Understand Community Members’ Experiences of Justice, Safety, Hope, and Racial Equity

“…Having conversations about racism in this country has historically been controversial (Bonilla-Silva, 2018). Discussing the existence of discrimination currently has the U.S. divided between Black Lives Matter versus All Lives Matter, forcing a choice between a false dichotomy (Gallagher, Reagan, Danforth & Dodds, 2018). In analyzing the transcripts from the group dialogues, some of the content resulted in discomfort from the harshness of participants' lived realities, even for members of the research team.…”

Local information sources received the most attention from Puerto Ricans during the aftermath of Hurricane Maria

“…Research into protest movements has used such interactions between accounts to specify a network representation [19][20][21]. Other work has analyzed the network topology of hashtag topics and used information theory to identify the differences in discourse between hashtag topics [22]. The use of network analysis on Twitter surrounding disasters is not new.…”

Defining Collective Identities in Technopolitical Interaction Networks

“…Interactions can also be valued (in positive or negative terms, in their strength, etc.) by introducing yet richer values to network edges on the basis of automated content analysis (like sentiment analysis), and it is also possible to study identification together with interactional identity attending to the content of discourse frames [see Gallagher et al (2018), for an example]. Such improvements go in the direction of extending the analysis from the syntactic (the interactional) into the semantic (the ideational) and potentially the pragmatics of technopolitics (Calleja-López, 2017).…”