A place-based analysis of #BlackLivesMatter and counter-protest content on Twitter
2019
Haffner, Matthew
The internet has become an integral part of social activism. The widespread nature of movements such as #OccupyWallStreet and #BlackLivesMatter on social media demonstrate the web’s efficacy in raising awareness on social issues. These movements often have their detractors, however, and online debate on racial protest in particular is often vigorous. While the #BlackLivesMatter movement has drawn considerable attention in sociological circles, little work has been conducted on how content manifests itself over space. In this article, I undertake a place-based approach to studying the factors driving #BlackLivesMatter and counter-protest content (e.g., #AllLivesMatter) through geolocated tweets in Louisiana and Texas Census Designated and Incorporated Places (i.e. cities). I find that the production of content meshes with color-blind racial theory and aligns with some offline processes, but perhaps not in the ways that one might expect. Percent black and percent Asian have a positive association with the production of both #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter content, while percent white and percent Hispanic have a negative association. The approach presented is novel in that it utilizes tweets with general location and information from users’ profile descriptions. The post hoc analysis demonstrates how bifurcating the data based on spatial and temporal characteristics can reveal subtle but, informative trends, yet results should be interpreted cautiously.
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