Social media is serving as global barbershops for surprisingly complex dialogues about everything from state-sponsored violence to racial privilege.
A new study examining the impact of the #BlackLivesMatter movement has found that its viral growth online has gained broad support, but that police shootings this summer in two U.S. cities by black men have also dampened approval.
The study, entitled “Social Media Conversations About Race,” was released Monday by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan American think tank that frequently examines race and ethnicity.
The most encouraging finding for U.S. race relations: the #BlackLivesMatter movement is driving millions and millions of substantive conversations online across races, ethnicities and international borders—further evidence it is arguably the most important Civil Rights effort of the digital age.
#BlackLivesMatter includes a loose, national coalition of on the ground activists that have helped spread word of and even uncover the violent arrests and deaths of black American civilians at the hands of police, gaining it an even wider audience in the process. The movement was created by three black, female activists: Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi and Alicia Garza as a “call to action” and “response to the anti-Black racism that permeates our society,” according to their website.
A global, real-world effort meets hashtag today, #BlackLivesMatter has appeared on Twitter almost 12 million times since its first use on Facebook, according to the social-media platform.
By examination of 1 billion publicly available tweets, The Pew Center found that in the past three years, 38 percent of those tweets were “supportive or made positive reference to the movement.” Slightly more than half of those, or 21 percent of all the tweets using the hashtag, offered “broad support for racial equality and opposition to police brutality.” Another 18 percent of tweets connected the hashtag to alleged police misconduct.
The Pew report offers a glimmer of hope amidst a seemingly endless stream of videotaped deaths of mostly black men across social media platforms in recent years. Such deaths have sparked ongoing riots in Milwaukee, the latest example of simmering racial tensions nationwide.
Just roughly one in ten social-media users have objected to the movement, although that number has risen this summer, Pew found. Pew also found online critics spiked after a lone black gunman killed five Dallas police in July. #AllLivesMatters and #BlueLivesMatter, a reference to police heroism, have become parallel and even opposing rallying cries.
—— Alex P. Kellogg