What Truly Matters? Using Linguistic Cues for Analyzing the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and its Counter Protests: 2013 to 2020

TL;DR

This study analyzes social media linguistic cues from 2013 to 2020 to understand how different movements like Black Lives Matter and counter protests use language and hashtags, revealing biases and thematic focuses.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-level text analysis of nearly 37 million tweets to uncover linguistic patterns and thematic relationships in social activism movements over time.

Findings

Black Lives Matter tweets focus on police brutality and racial injustice.

Counter protests use racially prejudicial hashtags more frequently.

Movements like Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter show different thematic focuses.

Abstract

Since the fatal shooting of 17-year old Black teenager Trayvon Martin in February 2012 by a White neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, there has been a significant increase in digital activism addressing police-brutality related and racially-motivated incidents in the United States. In this work, we administer an innovative study of digital activism by exploiting social media as an authoritative tool to examine and analyze the linguistic cues and thematic relationships in these three mediums. We conduct a multi-level text analysis on 36,984,559 tweets to investigate users' behaviors to examine the language used and understand the impact of digital activism on social media within each social movement on a sentence-level, word-level, and topic-level. Our results show that excessive use of racially-related or prejudicial hashtags were used by the counter protests which portray potential discriminatory tendencies. Consequently, our findings highlight that social activism done by Black Lives Matter activists does not diverge from the social issues and topics involving police-brutality related and racially-motivated killings of Black individuals due to the shape of its topical graph that topics and conversations encircling the largest component directly relate to the topic of Black Lives Matter. Finally, we see that both Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter movements depict a different directive, as the topics of Blue Lives Matter or All Lives Matter do not reside in the center. These findings suggest that topics and conversations within each social movement are skewed, random or possessed racially-related undertones, and thus, deviating from the prominent social injustice issues.