Rashawn Ray - "The Meaning of #BlackLivesMatter: The Evolution of a Social Media Identity."

Following the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, #BlackLivesMatter exploded into the social media sphere. As evidence by protests and unrest in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD, the hashtag social movement to curtail racial profiling and police brutality is still progressing three year later. Social scientists, public health scholars, and activists have documented the severity of police brutality, particularly for Blacks and Latinos. Missing, however, is a social psychological analysis that simultaneously combines the utility of sociological and humanist methodologies grounded in content analysis and quantitative analysis. This article takes up this challenge by analyzing data from a Twitter database on Ferguson. Drawing upon social identity theory, which has links to social movements and collectivist action, we analyze 31.65 million tweets on 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. In showcasing the most popular Twitter hashtags, tweeted images, and narratives, results show that social media activism is directly linked to boots on the ground, conflates with mainstream news coverage, and primarily comes from identified leading activists of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. We also show that a concerted counter narrative called #TCOT (Top Conservatives on Twitter) has operated as the anti-thesis to #BlackLive