The center conducted a survey of public attitudes toward political engagement and activities on social media, and also conducted a separate analysis of several hashtags on Twitter. First, we examined the amount of tweets using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag and other hashtags related to issues, causes, and news events to see how usage varied over time and across issue areas. did. We then conducted a content analysis of the topics most frequently mentioned in conversations around the #BlackLivesMatter, #BlueLivesMatter, and #AllLivesMatter hashtags during major news events.
The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag has had a relatively stable presence on Twitter over the past five years, regularly increasing in usage around important events.
The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag first appeared on Twitter five years ago, in July 2013, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. From July 2013 to May 1, 2018, the hashtag was used approximately 30 million times on Twitter, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of public tweets using Crimson Hexagon software. It was used an average of 17,002 times a day. Although the hashtag took some time to gain traction, it is now used on a daily basis in response to news and discussions about real-world events, particularly fatal crashes between law enforcement and Black Americans. frequency is increasing regularly.
One of the most notable of these spikes occurred over approximately 10 days in the summer of 2016. On July 5th of that year, Alton Sterling was shot and killed by a police officer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The next day, Philando Castile was shot and killed by a police officer outside St. Paul, Minnesota. On July 7, a gunman killed five police officers and injured several others in Dallas, Texas, and on July 17, another gunman attacked and killed police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three officers were killed and three others were injured.
In the 10-day period from July 7th to 17th, 2016, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag received an average of nearly 500,000 tweet mentions each day. In fact, as of May 1, 2018, the top 10 days with the most mentions of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag all occurred during these 10 days in 2016. The #BlueLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter hashtags also saw a significant increase. Usage status during this period. These 10 days accounted for 8 of the 10 most used days for the #AllLivesMatter hashtag and 6 of the 10 most used days for #BlueLivesMatter.
After these events, each of these hashtags is used at roughly the same rate as their historical average. From July 18, 2016 to May 1, 2018, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was used an average of 15,856 times each day. The #BlueLivesMatter hashtag is used an average of 3,998 times a day, and #AllLivesMatter is used an average of 1,844 times a day.
Beyond #BlackLivesMatter: Differences in the evolution of selected hashtags related to political causes and social issues
The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag is a classic example of a hashtag tied to a political issue or cause, and as noted above, has maintained a relatively high baseline level of usage on Twitter for several years. I did. But there are many other hashtags associated with different causes, events, and political issues, and these hashtags are evolving in different ways. As a case study of how these types of hashtags are used on Twitter today, the center examined five different hashtags he used (#MAGA, #MeToo, #Resist, #JeSuisCharlie, #LoveWins) and determined how frequently they were used. I looked at how things have changed. For many years.
The #MAGA hashtag has become increasingly popular on Twitter since early 2016, peaking just after the November 2016 US election. From Election Day 2016 to May 1, 2018, the #MAGA hashtag was used an average of 205,238 times per day. The #Resist hashtag, on the other hand, began appearing as a consistent presence on his Twitter shortly after the 2016 election and became widely used shortly after President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017. From Inauguration Day until his May 1, 2018, #Resist hashtag has been used. It happens an average of 59,716 times every day on Twitter.
Although the “Me Too” movement was founded in 2006, the #MeToo hashtag gained attention in 2017 and has been seen with some frequency in the wake of revelations of sexual harassment and assault allegations by Hollywood’s proud Harvey Weinstein. continues to be used. On October 16, 2017, the platform was used hundreds of thousands of times by users to join and share personal stories of harassment and abuse. From that date until May 1, 2018, #MeToo appeared on his Twitter an average of 61,911 times per day.
In other examples, hashtags related to an event or cause appear almost instantaneously, quickly reach very high levels of popularity, and then disappear (at varying levels and at varying speeds) from public visibility. Masu. An example of this phenomenon is the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag commemorating the January 7, 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting in France. #JeSuisCharlie was used approximately 2 million times on January 7 and 8, 2015, even though it essentially didn’t exist before the shooting. But today, aside from the anniversary of the shooting, its presence is relatively minimal: From January 1, 2016 to May 1, 2018, it was used an average of only 291 times per day.
The #LoveWins hashtag commemorating the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 26, 2015 decision on same-sex marriage is another example of this phenomenon. #LoveWins appeared on his Twitter more than 7 million times on the day of the Supreme Court decision. This number far exceeds his highest daily volume for long-standing hashtags such as #MAGA and #BlackLivesMatter. The day after the verdict. However, these two days alone accounted for 63% of all instances of that hashtag appearing on Twitter in the roughly three years from the date of the Supreme Court’s decision to May 1, 2018.
Case studies of topics mentioned in Twitter discussions including the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter, #BlueLivesMatter, and #AllLivesMatter
In addition to examining the volume of tweets using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag over the past five years, the center identified key hashtags related to broader Twitter conversations about race, police, and fatalities. We also conducted a separate analysis to understand how often the topics were mentioned. Incidents involving Black people and law enforcement. To perform this analysis, the center first queries Twitter’s Gnip API to find four hashtags related to these topics at five specific high-volume points (specific hashtags include #BlackLivesMatter, #AllLivesMatter , #BlueLivesMatter, and #BLM). The period from 2014 to 2018 coincided with a significant increase in the use of these hashtags.
These time periods examine five major news events, including when the Ferguson, Missouri, police officers involved in the shooting death of Michael Brown were not indicted. The police-involved shooting of Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and the killings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The acquittal of the police officer in the shooting death of Philando Castile. President Trump speaks out about NFL national anthem protests. Stephon Clark was shot and killed by a Sacramento police officer.
After discarding undecipherable tweets or tweets written in languages ​​other than English, this data collection produced a corpus of 1,312,385 tweets mentioning one or more of these hashtags during these five time periods. I did. The center then used a two-step process to identify whether individual tweets mentioned specific topics. In a first step, the researchers manually examined a small subset of tweets to identify some of the key topics mentioned in these discussions. Topics identified related to these hashtags include:
- Police-related fatalities – These tweets include specific names of people who have had fatal encounters with law enforcement.
- Violence in general – These Tweets refer to specific acts of violence, whether or not they occurred in a law enforcement context.
- police and law enforcement – These Tweets reference police, law enforcement actions, counterprotest measures, and general references to law enforcement. Does not include references to shootings or other actions unless explicitly mentioning law enforcement or police.
- national politicians and political parties – These tweets mention specific politicians, elected officials, or political parties. No mention of local politicians or elected officials is included.
- race – These Tweets explicitly reference race, specific racial or ethnic groups, or racism. This category does not include references to culture, religion, or immigration unless a specific race or ethnicity is mentioned.
- protests – These tweets refer to activist events, specific protests, or protests in general.
The researchers then identified a representative set of words and phrases that could accurately identify tweets mentioning each topic, and tabulated all tweets in the broader dataset that contained keywords representative of each topic. I have summarized it. This allowed the Center to calculate the share of tweets mentioning each of these broad topic areas for each individual time period (and for these five time periods together). For more information on this process, please see the methodology section of this report.
It is important to note that these topics are not mutually exclusive and a tweet can be classified into multiple categories depending on the words used in that tweet. It is also important to note that, as with any coding process, this is not the only set of codes and topics that can be developed and applied to this data set. The goal of this particular project was to quantify how often broad topics are mentioned in a large collection of tweets in a way that can be replicated at scale.
Some of the results of this analysis are:
The most common topics in this collection of tweets are explicit references to race and references to law enforcement.
Of the topics identified in this analysis, three are particularly common. A quarter of the tweets in this data collection explicitly mentioned race, and 21% mentioned police or law enforcement. These two topics were closely followed by general mentions of acts of violence (law enforcement related or not), mentioned in 18% of these tweets. In addition to being the most common topics overall, these three topics were mentioned at relatively consistent levels across all five specific time periods evaluated in the study.
Discussions about protests (mentioned in 12% of tweets), fatal encounters with police (11%), and national politicians or political parties (8%) are slightly less common overall.
Tweets mentioning protests or fatal encounters with police are very common at some points, but less common at others.
There was wide variation in its usage across these five different points in discussions related to protests and specific fatalities with police. Following the announcement that police officer Darren Wilson would not stand trial for the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, 35% of tweets mentioned discussions about the fatal shooting with police. However, this topic was mentioned in just 2% of his tweets surrounding the NFL national anthem protests and Black Lives Matter marches in the fall of 2017. Similarly, in this latter period, discussions about protests accounted for 31% of the discussion. .
Mentions of national politicians and political parties are relatively rare, but they dominated the discussion during Fall 2017.
In most cases, the tweets in this data collection do not have many explicit references to national politicians or political parties. This topic accounted for only 8% of the tweets in the overall sample collected for this study. However, there is one major exception. These discussions accounted for 18% of his total tweets from September 22nd to October 22nd. February 2017