“Chapter 9 - Social Justice, National Cultural Politics, and the Summer of 2020” in “Social Media, Social Justice, and the Political Economy of Online Networks”
Throughout our study of social media and social justice movements, we have endeavored to enhance our methodologies through the course of each data set. As we progressed through each of these cases (Ferguson in 2014, the 2016 election, and now 2020), the network dynamics are more complex, and thus more advanced methods are required. At first, in the Ferguson case, we looked at acute, punctuated moments around a particular event in which social justice efforts intersected with the engagement of social media and showed the potential for how social justice groups may use social media to reshape communicative power.
We then moved on to broader movements in politics and examined network behavior over time, how things go viral, how networks can be affected, and what social justice groups can learn from how the political right engages in network activity. From this data we were able to demonstrate how pro-Trump actors were more effective in attracting attention and dominating activity on Twitter through centralizing their themes and employing similar hashtags.
Reflecting on these previous cases, Ferguson in 2014, which demonstrated the political potential of social media for social justice groups; and the 2016 election campaign, which showed how a right-leaning political faction can dominate a social media network despite being outnumbered – we now ask whether social justice groups (and the political left) are too fractured as social networks to be an effective political force? Furthermore, we considered how the political right was engaged in left-leaning social justice movements taking shape on Twitter. We look to some of the events that shaped the early summer of 2020 to find these answers, after three separate killings of Black people occurred within months of each other in different cities across the U.S. Protests peaked after the death of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis, as the fallout from earlier shootings of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia (in February) and Breonna Taylor in Louisville (in March) began to take shape. Events surrounding all three killings converge in late May and early June of 2020.
Ahmaud Arbery
On February 23, 2020, an unarmed Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, who was out jogging in Brunswick, Georgia, was confronted by a white father and son before being fatally shot as another white companion video-recorded the carnage on his phone. The video of Arbery’s murder was released on May 5, 2020, and quickly went viral, sparking outcry over racial profiling by the white men, including one, who was a former police officer in the Georgia county in which Ahmaud’s killing occurred. On May 7, 2020, the father and son (Gregory and Travis McMichael) were arrested for Ahmaud’s murder and two weeks later, their neighbor who recorded the shooting, William Bryan, was arrested (on May 21, 2020). The latest arrest occurred at the same time that another killing of an unarmed Black person, this time at the hands of police, was gaining national awareness, as protests kept sustained attention on these events.1
Breonna Taylor
In the early morning hours of March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, was shot and killed in her Louisville, Kentucky apartment by plainclothes police officers, who were serving a no-knock search warrant (at the wrong residence). The actual targets of the search warrant were in another dwelling several miles away. On May 15, Taylor’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the officers involved in the shooting and the city of Louisville, as protests over Taylor’s death continued in the city for months. During a June 1 demonstration in Louisville, a Black business owner, David McAtee, was shot and killed by police who had failed to wear or activate their body cameras, prompting the firing of the city’s chief of police and further heightening attention on social justice movements taking place in cities across the U.S.2
George Floyd
The ongoing outcry over the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor congealed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin on May 25, 2020. Videos of Floyd’s death captured by onlookers were shared on social media and television news outlets. The images and audio were potent – showing Floyd pleading that he could not breathe, as bystanders pleaded with Chauvin and other officers standing nearby to show mercy. Floyd was held face down on the street with his hands cuffed behind his back as Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck. Floyd ultimately became unresponsive and died. The brutality of Floyd’s detention was disproportionate to the reason for his arrest – concern that he had tried to pass a counterfeit $20 dollar bill at a convenience store. Disquiet over the untimely deaths of Arbery, Taylor, and Floyd, as well as other unarmed Black people, culminated in thousands of people taking to the streets across big cities and small towns across America in late May and throughout June under the banner “Black Lives Matter.”
This moment was also met by counter-protesters from the political right, including a community in Bethel, Ohio that made international headlines.3 Over these weeks the markers of social justice, such as #BlackLivesMatter, #EnoughIsEnough, and #ICantBreathe clashed on Twitter with counter-emblems of the political right, including #BackTheBlue, #BlueLivesMatter, #AllLivesMatter, as well as Trump specific campaign hashtags, #MAGA, #KAG, and #Trump. As such, it was an opportune period of time to further explore how power operates in contestations over social justice and cultural politics on social media. While social media demonstrated great potential as a platform for social justice advocates to reframe public discourse during Ferguson in 2014, the political right also showed the strength of its social networking in the 2016 election season. Now in the summer of 2020, both forces from left-leaning social justice movements and the Trump-led political right (fueled by another presidential election campaign) collided on Twitter. How did social justice advocates fare on social media when engaged by a strongly congealed network of the political right?
Procedures for analysis
Our third set of data visualizations examines two important periods in May of 2020: after the video of Arbery’s murder was released on May 5, and after Floyd’s killing on May 25, when activity on Twitter was peppered with tweets and hashtags about the deaths of Arbery, Taylor, and Floyd, as well as the 2020 presidential campaign. Building upon our core methodology developed in chapters 3 and 6 in this book, this set of Twitter data visualizations is derived from an automated extraction process developed in Python 3.6 that allowed us to search for specified hashtags, terms, and words in tweets from the Twitter historical archive. The results were sorted by day in a flat JSON file, and formatted in two ways: one for exploring tweet-retweet relationships; and another for viewing basic descriptive statistics about the search terms. The tweet-retweet relationships are featured as an array of nodes, which consists of users in the searched data, and links are built between those users and others who retweeted them. These nodes and links are visualized using a modified D3.js force-directed graph that is filterable by time.
Originally, we sought to create a set of network visualizations for time periods following the killings, including the five days following Taylor’s shooting (March 13–17), five days following the video footage released of Arbery’s killing (May 5–9), and five days following Floyd’s death (May 26–30). However, there was not a comparable amount of Twitter activity during the March dates, while the other two data sets from May yielded overwhelming results due to their size. The latter of the two sets of data for May (following Floyd’s killing) were too large to render for a five-day period, so we only sampled two days (May 26–27) for this network so that it can be used more easily in the interactive data sets presented below. The data visualization dashboards provided here allow for interactive explorations of the data collected (see the URLs below for data sets 1a–1e and 2a–2b). Building off our procedures in Chapter 6, we also present the centrality of the major nodes in both degree and betweenness, as represented through numerical data and visual representations of these networks. Betweenness and degree is also shown in a sidebar, which indicates the frequency a specified Twitter handle uses a particular hashtag and the rate at which that hashtag co-occurs within the handles’ network.
Data sets 1a–1e: Ahmaud Arbery
In analyzing the hashtags employed by Twitter users throughout data sets 1a–1e and 2a and 2b we adapted the schemas presented and discussed in Chapter 3.4 From the data presented in this chapter, we considered the varying hashtags to be in one of three categories: victim names, social justice ideological/conceptual markers, and political right ideological/conceptual markers (see Figure 9.1 below). “Victim names” were hashtags that were either #BreonnaTaylor, #AhmaudArbery, or #GeorgeFloyd. These were simply markers that made a factual reference to the victim. In the “social justice” category were hashtags that implied an ideological belief in support of social justice (e.g., #BlackLivesMatter) or made a personal conceptualization of the killing (e.g., #ICantBreathe). “Political right” hashtags were ones that suggested political beliefs counter to the social justice movement (e.g., #BackTheBlue) and were often used in tandem with pro-Trump campaign tags (e.g., #MakeAmericaGreatAgain and #KeepAmericaGreat).
It should be noted in our schemas described above and presented in Figure 9.1 below that these are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories. For instance, in Blevins et al. (2019) and again in Chapter 3, the ideological and conceptual markers were separate groupings.5 In the case of Ferguson, we separated ideological markers, such as #BlackLivesMatter, from conceptual ones, such as #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, to isolate the phenomenon of individuals who noted how their race or color would be implicated in an officer-involved shooting. These conceptual markers were often used in conjunction with ideological ones supporting social justice, which is why we collapsed the two categories into one when looking at the data in this chapter. We noted a similar pairing in these data sets with political right markers and pro-Trump tags. Moreover, we were also cognizant of the hashtag hijacking strategies described in Chapter 5 that have been applied by both social justice advocates and political-right pro-Trump forces.
| Victim names | Social justice | Political right |
|---|---|---|
| #BreonnaTaylor | #BLM | #AllLivesMatter |
| #AhmaudArbery | #BlackLivesMatter | #BlueLivesMatter |
| #GeorgeFloyd | #policebrutality | #BackTheBlue |
| #EnoughIsEnough | #MAGA | |
| #ICantBreath | #MakeAmericaGreatAgain | |
| #SayHerName | #KAG | |
| #SayHisName | #KeepAmericaGreat | |
| #JusticeForBreonna Taylor | #Trump | |
| #JusticeForAhmaudArbery | ||
| #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd |
Hashtag Schemas
Prominence of victim names in the hashtags
The hashtag #AhmaudArbery dwarfs all others on May 5, 2020. It is in the center of the network and prominent throughout its perimeter as well (see Figure 9.2). Moreover, it remains the dominant hashtag in the days that follow.
By May 9, 2020, though, three other hashtags grow more prominent in the network, including #SeanReed, #SayHerName, #JusticeForBreonnaTaylor, and #BlackLivesMatter (see Figure 9.3).
Although the #SayHerName hashtag was initiated during the Sandra Bland case from 2015, it most likely associated with the more recent Breonna Taylor incident during this week of 2020. Bland was found dead in a Texas jail cell after her arrest during a traffic stop. As Owens noted, “the names of too many Black men and boys killed by police – Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice – are widely known, Black women’s cases have rarely garnered national attention.” 6 Breonna Taylor’s killing was one of the exceptions, especially after Ahmaud Arbery’s death.
Interestingly, Twitter activity in the aftermath of the release of video showing Arbery’s murder also drew attention to lesser-known cases on the national level. Namely, the #SeanReed hashtag referred to Sean Reed’s shooting death in Indianapolis on May 6, 2020. Police spotted Reed, a Black U.S. Army veteran, driving erratically and pursued him. Reed started a Facebook Live video during his pursuit by the officers. After fleeing his vehicle, Reed (who was unarmed) was shot several times, and as he lay dead his Facebook Live stream recorded officers joking that his funeral was going to have to be one with a “closed casket”.7
The pattern of tagging the victim’s name in posts is also notable in the day after George Floyd’s killing (see Figure 9.4).
By the second day after Floyd’s death, two other names of recent victims become visible in the network’s hashtags, including #BreonnaTaylor and #ahmaudarbery (see Figure 9.5). This phenomenon is indicative of a shift in power from media and police defining victims, to affective publics identifying the victims and linking their deaths to the themes of social justice.
Social justice themes throughout the network
What is, perhaps, more significant is that while the #GeorgeFloyd hashtag dominates the network on May 26 (see Figure 9.4), it is surpassed by the #BlackLivesMatter tag during the next day on May 27 (see Figure 9.5). Moreover, a broader array of other social-justice-themed hashtags are present in the network, including #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd, #ICantBreathe, #SayHisName, and #PoliceBrutality (see Figure 9.6).
One of the more notable tweets on May 27, 2020, that evoked the #ICantBreathe hashtag was produced by @ColorofChange (see Figure 9.7). The tweet combines hashtags that personally identify the victim, #GeorgeFloyd, along with a relevant theme of social justice, #ICantBreathe, as Floyd exclaimed “I can’t breathe” while being pinned to the ground. Moreover, #ICantBreathe was not only relevant to the Floyd case; it was first evoked after the death of Eric Garner, another unarmed Black man, who was killed by police officers in New York on July 17, 2014. Garner was approached by police officers for selling single cigarettes and died after an officer restrained him with a chokehold. Like Floyd, Garner had pleaded, “I can’t breathe,” before his death; and also, like Floyd, the violent manner in which he was apprehended by police seemed greatly disproportionate to the crime he was suspected of committing.
Besides the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag that clearly resonated the most as a theme of social justice after the Floyd killing, another social-justice-themed hashtag of note is #SayHerName. As mentioned earlier, this tag was first used following the death of Sandra Bland in 2015 and it emerged, notably, again in May of 2020 after the Breonna Taylor killing. The use of the hashtag is remarkable in that it represents the intersection of several social justice themes, while focusing on the underreported victimization of Black women by police violence.8 However, while the #SayHerName hashtag is employed frequently, it does not occupy a central place in the network, as it is scattered in small pockets and only congeals on the margins (see Figure 9.8).
The political right on the margins
Curiously, perhaps, the most prominent political-right hashtag after the viral video release of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder was #BlueLivesMatter (see Figure 9.9). The #BlueLivesMatter tag has been invoked as a political-right sentiment in response to officer-involved shootings. What seems unusual in this case is that Arbery was not killed by police officers, although one of the assailants was a former police officer. Similarly, the #AllLivesMatter hashtag (see Figure 9.10) is another political-right counter sentiment to the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which centers blackness in discourses about the killing of unarmed Black people.
Major findings
From the data presented here, we can see that the events of early 2020 resonated broadly on Twitter, as a vast array of Twitter activity linked specific victims to the broader themes of social justice. What is not evident is whether certain social justice groups or accounts associated with the political left were particularly dominant within the network. Rather, the momentum of awareness that built around the cases of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, as well as their deaths’ implicit attachment to the cause of social justice, was so great that otherwise politically fractured networks congealed around a few core messages, including the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.
There is also evidence here that the political right was actively engaged in counterposing the themes of social justice on Twitter. While those on the political right may have been vastly outnumbered in this case, the data also suggests that they still possess greater solidarity – as a political force – than those on the left. We then must ask, what does this mean for the potential use of social media for social justice in the future? How may the political economy of online networks shape this future? We address these questions in our concluding chapter.
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