In this chapter we begin to examine how social media can empower and affect social justice movements, focusing on Black Lives Matter. We do this by applying and comparing the lessons of social media messaging in the Ferguson case to on-the-ground social justice activities in Cincinnati led by @BlackLivesMatterCincy and their efforts surrounding the Sam DuBose shooting. When examining the significance of social media in shaping political discourse about events and activities related to social justice efforts, it becomes apparent that social justice movements would be well served to include media reform advocacy into their efforts. Moreover, we begin to see that despite the kind of empowerment social media provide social justice groups, these platforms are still subject to political pressures and manipulations.

We start the conversation about social media and social justice in the digital age by looking at the array of methods scholars have employed to study the relationship between online social networks and social justice movements. These have included quantitative content analysis, qualitative interviews, discourse analysis, and explorations of big data to get macro- and micro-level perspectives on cases in Guatemala, the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter. We provide a comprehensive political economic examination and network analyses of the relationship between social media (particularly Twitter) in contemporary social justice movements and political discourse. In addition to exploring the intended use of social media by social justice advocates, we look at how news media and other commercial interests shape discourse about social justice and politics.

The first set of data visualizations demonstrate the powerful use of social media in the aftermath of Ferguson. Through the #Ferguson case we explore the relationship between social media and social justice movements, as social media and mobile streaming applications provide a potent form of storytelling power to users across the communicative landscape. Notably, the use of social media platforms during Ferguson changed some of the relationship between news media and the public in significant ways, as social justice advocates used social media platforms to document and livestream events to a global audience. In the #Ferguson case, social media became a primary venue for public commentary about related events and disrupted some of the gatekeeping power once held by national news outlets and talk radio in the discussion of public affairs. The interactions between the public and journalists became more dynamic in this case when certain content posted by citizens was shared on mainstream news outlets, thus validating their significance.

Later we take some of the lessons from #Ferguson and apply them to another community affected by the shooting of an unarmed Black man by a white police officer, and explore the effective use of social media platforms, as well as more traditional forms of activism by @BlackLivesMatterCincy. Through in-depth interviews with social justice leaders in Cincinnati we learn about their social media strategies following the shooting of a Black motorist by a University of Cincinnati police officer. Additionally, we explore how legacy news outlets in Cincinnati covered the @BlackLivesMatterCincy group that mobilized after the shooting, and provide a critical examination of access to internet, mobile media, and legacy news among low-income groups that shapes social justice efforts in significant ways. Through further political economic analysis, we examine the need for social justice activists to support media policy reform in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020. Chauvin, who is white, pressed his knee into the neck of Floyd, who was Black, as he lay prone in the street with his hands cuffed behind his back. Floyd was unarmed and apprehended for suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 dollar bill at a convenience store. As onlookers recorded video of Floyd as he pleaded that he could not breathe, video that would be shared on social media in the weeks that followed, they also appealed to Chauvin and the other police officers that looked on to stop or intervene before Floyd became unresponsive and died. Videos of Floyd’s death were shared on social media and television news outlets, as people gathered by the thousands in cities across the U.S. and world to decry police violence against Black people. Throughout this period the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter trended on Twitter and other social media outlets.

With #BlackLivesMatter as an emblem, social media and Twitter in particular has become the frontline for social justice advocacy and debates following the deaths of unarmed Black people at the hands of police, or neighborhood watchdogs, beginning with George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin in 2013. Although the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was coined during the fallout of Martin’s death in 2013, our analysis begins with the fatal shooting of an unarmed Black teenager by a white police officer in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson on August 9, 2014. This event captured national and international attention in the days, weeks, and months that followed through the images and commentary taking place on social media. As the hashtag #Ferguson trended on Twitter, legacy media outlets followed the social media activity around the protests, the militarized police response, and calls for social justice.

A similar event occurred in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in 2001 after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager. However, this was before mobile telecommunications and social media developed into what it was in the mid-2010s, and the protests taking place in Cincinnati only garnered national attention for a few days.

While some critics praised social media for sustaining interest in the events taking place in #Ferguson, others blamed it for prolonging civil unrest in the area. Nonetheless, everyone seemed to agree that social media made a difference.

For instance, the power of social media to disrupt legacy journalistic routines was described by Alfred Hermida in a number of news stories where activity on Twitter outpaced traditional outlets, including the 2009 Iranian election in which tweets about the disputed elections results peaked at over 221,000 in just one hour.1 Earlier in 2009, Janis Krums’s historic picture taken with his iPhone and posted to Twitter immediately after a US Airways commercial flight that made an emergency landing in the Hudson River of New York literally crashed the TwitPic servers due to the high number of views of the image.2 While this moment has nothing to do with social justice, it was a watershed moment for the shift away from the traditional gatekeeping function of legacy news media. People without formal media credentials were no longer strictly confined to the role of audience and for good or bad, the power of professional journalists in the public sphere was diminished.

The impact of social media on social justice movements was, perhaps, first seen in Guatemala after the 2009 murder of Rodrigo Rosenberg in which the victim appeared in a video recorded before (but released after) his death that blamed President Alvaro Colom for his killing. The video quickly spread on Facebook and YouTube, sparking groups to mobilize on social media. In a content analysis of some of the related Facebook pages, Summer Harlow found that user “comments were framed to mobilize and advance an online justice movement” that also developed into offline protests and civic action, decrying the violence.3 Harlow concluded that Facebook offered outraged Guatemalans a forum to express opinions, organize, mobilize, and act as citizen journalists by documenting protests and activities – thus bypassing the traditional gatekeeping function of mainstream news media. While the Guatemalans that Harlow interviewed were mixed in their views about the potential role of social media in social movements, the so-called Arab Spring, which occurred two years later, would further demonstrate its significance.4

In a comprehensive study that included a database of social media data from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, Philip Howard and colleagues found that social media played an integral role in the Arab Spring of 2011.5 Conversations about revolutionary actions would take place on social media before those events would occur, and social media helped to spread information about those events across international boundaries. As social media activity and protests against repressive regimes in Tunisia and Egypt rose, those governments fell. The wave of protests and organization on social media then swept across other parts of North Africa and the Middle East as organizers and advocates for greater democracy in those regions used social media to circumvent state-controlled media. Moreover, how the Arab Spring played out on social media fostered “transnational links between individuals and groups” allowing social justice movements to tell “compelling stories . . . in short text messages or long video documentaries.”6 Western journalists then picked up these stories from social media and carried them to audiences on traditional news outlets.

Hermida, Lewis, and Zamith looked at the intersection of journalism and activism on Twitter as a place where activists and journalists make news together. Their case study focused on NPR journalist Andy Carvin’s coverage of the Egyptian and Tunisian uprisings on Twitter, and his selection of sources in the coverage. Hermida, Lewis, and Zamith found that Carvin used a significant number of “nonelite” or alternative sources on Twitter, giving credence to the claim that social media broadens the scope of voices in the media in general.7

While the Arab Spring successfully demonstrated the role of social media in allowing people to document protests and provided commentary outside of the gatekeeping of traditional news media, the Occupy Wall Street movement that started in September 2011 near New York City’s financial district to protest corporate corruption and governmental influence provided further illustration of social media’s power to engage individuals not directly (or physically) involved in on-the-ground demonstrations. As Kevin DeLuca, Sean Lawson, and Ye Sun showed, the Occupy Wall Street movement created a context for both collective activism and perceptual participation, both of which occurred outside the mainstream news media.8

Additionally, the Occupy Wall Street movement showed the strategic potential for Twitter to enhance the visibility and symbolic power of social justice efforts. Rong Wang and Winlin Liu examined Twitter data during a two-day period of Occupy Wall Street and found that strategic combinations of viral hashtags by users would mobilize public figures and other influential actors towards the movement.9 Using Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley’s “virality” framework that describes the flow of specific social information within one’s own social network, as well as “distant networks, resulting in a sharp acceleration in the number of people who are exposed to the message” within a short period of time,10 Wang, Liu, and Gao found that the tweets with powerful social messages had the ability to “go viral” and were helpful in making a networked social movement more prominent.11

More than just going viral, though, social media platforms have become an important venue for self-definition of otherwise marginalized voices. For instance, following a string of murders and suicides of LGBTQ youth in 2012, Janet Mock engaged her “cultural capital” through the use of YouTube videos and supportive hashtags such as #GirlsLikeUs, to advocate for trans women.12 In China, LGBTQ people used the microblogging social media outlet Weibo to generate alternative discourses about sexual orientation and challenge government censorship under the #IAmGay# tag.13 In the U.S., feminist social movements have engaged in hashtag activism, such as #MeToo, to provide voice to an array of social and political problems.14

What connects these disparate social justice movements for the purpose of analysis here is their use of social media platforms to engage with a broader group of like-minded strangers and making a somewhat headless network addressing some form of social change. Admittedly, these are massive and quickly changing arenas, which can be analyzed through a number of different frameworks. Clay Shirky provided one of the first more comprehensive examinations of people using social media tools, such as MySpace, Twitter, and Flickr, to do things without traditional organizational structures. Shirky noted that social media platforms broke down traditional barriers of time and cost in communication among a large body of people.15 Similarly, Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman presented online social networks as liberating and empowering in what they described as “networked individualism” in a “triple revolution” of social networking, internet capacity, and constant connectivity of mobile devices.16

However, Shirky tempered some of these networked utopian sentiments and observed that the components of interaction among social media networks were complex and did not guarantee the success of a group’s objectives. Shirky also warned of the “mass amateurization” of journalism that would change the way news is spread.17 Along a similar vein, Zeynep Tufekci raised similar concerns about the ultimate fate of networked movements in the face of perplexing contradictions, such as the concurrent rise of empowering social technologies along with authoritarian regimes, as well as the spread of misinformation on social media being more effective than outright censorship at squelching the voices of social justice advocates.18 For instance, a Twitter account belonging to the white nationalist group Identity Evropa falsely claimed that it represented “antifa” during protests over George Floyd’s killing by a police officer in Minneapolis.19 The account handle, “@ANTIFA_US” attempted to incite violence while unfairly placing the blame on social justice advocates. As this example shows, there is more to the story of how social justice activity on social media plays out. While social media platforms can facilitate otherwise weak interpersonal ties into informal networks of common purpose, understanding how human relationships form on social media around causes of social justice is only part of the dynamic that warrants scholarly investigation, as these networks are also shaped by larger political and economic forces, including misinformation, manipulation, and deception.

Our book enters this body of scholarship to provide a comprehensive political economic examination and network analysis of the relationship between social media (particularly Twitter) in contemporary social justice movements and political discourse. In addition to exploring the intended use of social media by social justice advocates, this work will also look at how commercial interests (through the use of bots, and people posting and re-Tweeting items simply to “get clicks”) shapes discourse about social justice and politics, as well as efforts to sow disinformation.

Our initial study focused exclusively on the #BlackLivesMatter social justice cases related to #Ferguson.20 This took an unexpected turn after the U.S. presidential election in 2016, in which Russian-based operations exploited social media platforms with the intention of influencing political sentiments among different groups of Americans. Naturally, we wondered about how troll accounts, bots, and other forms of digital manipulation might have been employed amid some of the social justice events we were studying, and how these fit into election politics and the broader political economy of online social media networks.

Our scope broadened, similarly to what Kate Starbird described about a University of Washington study of the way in which “framing contests” emerged on social media about #BlackLivesMatter.21 After the U.S. House Intelligence Committee in November 2017 released a list of Twitter accounts that were the product of Russia’s Internet Research Agency during the 2016 election cycle, Starbird’s team realized that several of these accounts were ones that had been active in the #BlackLivesMatter conversations they had been studying. Specifically, tweets that Starbird’s team had been analyzing were not created by “real” #BlackLivesMatter activists or #BluesLivesMatter proponents; they were instead products of the Russian-based Internet Research Agency. As Starbird explained, this revelation underscored the power and nuance of manipulative strategies online:

These IRA agents were enacting caricatures of politically active U.S. citizens. In some cases, these were gross caricatures of the worst kinds of online actors, using the most toxic rhetoric. But, in other cases, these accounts appeared to be everyday people like us, people who care about the things we care about, people who want the things we want, people who share our values and frames. 22

Moreover, as Starbird’s group discovered, Russian-based trolls had been involved in an array of U.S.-based political conversations through social media, including gun rights, immigration, and others.

While Starbird’s team kept their subsequent research focused on frames and Russian manipulation of frames, our approach has broadened to understand various forms of influence on social media networks, including trolling activity and bullying from a variety of actors, the use of bots, as well as tweet and retweet relationships, to understand how social networks form and may be gamed. Altogether, this intersection of voices (real and fake), technology, economic concerns, and social networks forming online creates an epistemic environment that is fraught with difficulty for advocates of social justice.

The first part of this book is a big-data analysis of social justice movements at the global and local scales on Twitter, and our primary test case is #BlackLivesMatter and related hashtags that were invoked in the aftermath of the Mike Brown shooting in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson in 2014. The purpose of this initial part of our study is to provide an overview of the semantic discourse of the millions of tweets that defined the social movement globally and to examine the story elements that people tend to focus on through their use of specific hashtags. From this analysis it appears that the conversation on Twitter tended to focus on the personal meaning of story events and framed the shooting as something relatable to the posters’ own lives and experiences.

Our analysis continues by applying and comparing the lessons of social media messaging in the Ferguson case to on-the-ground social justice activities in Cincinnati led by @BlackLivesMatterCincy and their efforts surrounding the Sam DuBose shooting. When examining the significance of social media in shaping political discourse about events and activities related to social justice efforts it becomes apparent that social justice movements would be well served to include media reform strategies into their efforts.

The second part of our book moves to a broader discussion about political discourse on social media, especially in relation to Twitter trolls, cyber-bullying, harassment, misinformation, and other behavior patterns that can undercut social justice groups’ efforts to effectively engage in political conversations taking shape online. The section focuses on Twitter activity during the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle when concerns came to the fore about the impact that fake news, bots, and propaganda campaigns had in shaping political dialogue.

The third and final section of our analysis brings together an examination of social justice and political discourse in critical political economic perspective, and endeavors to contribute to an ongoing critical-cultural examination of the interplay between online social networks, political economics, and social justice, including Christian Fuchs’s “Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media,”23 which examined critical cultural theory as applied to the culture and economy of social media, and Zizi Papacharissi’s “Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology and Politics,” which provided an insightful analysis of the affective nature of Twitter streams within political debates.24 From our analysis, the political economic struggle that is taking place throughout online networks can be seen as two opposing forces of social justice efforts from the bottom up, and social propaganda from the top down, as well as other artificially created communities, in which social networks’ business models generate links between people. Here we apply Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s class propaganda model to the digital marketplace of ideas and find that too often grassroots movements can be manufactured from the top down via social media networks, confounding social justice movements and confusing epistemic validity within political discourse.25