We investigate perceptions of tweets marked with the #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter hashtags, as well as how the presence or absence of those hashtags changed the meaning and subsequent interpretation of tweets in U.S. participants. We found a strong effect of partisanship on perceptions of the tweets, such that participants on the political left were more likely to view #AllLivesMatter tweets as racist and offensive, while participants on the political right were more likely to view #BlackLivesMatter tweets as racist and offensive. Moreover, we found that political identity explained evaluation results far better than other measured demographics. Additionally, to assess the influence of hashtags themselves, we removed them from tweets in which they originally appeared and added them to selected neutral tweets. Our results have implications for our understanding of how social identity, and particularly political identity, shapes how individuals perceive and engage with the world.

We investigate partisan perceptions of tweets marked with the #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter hashtags, as well as how the presence or absence of those hashtags changed the meaning and subsequent interpretation of those tweets in U.S. participants. We found a strong effect of partisanship on perceptions of the tweets, such that participants on the political left were more likely to view #AllLivesMatter tweets as racist and offensive, while participants on the political right were more likely to view #BlackLivesMatter tweets as racist and offensive. Moreover, we measured the influence of the hashtags themselves by removing them from tweets in which they originally appeared as well as by adding them to tweets selected to be politically neutral. We found that the hashtags seem to operate as context cues. In particular, adding #AllLivesMatter to neutral tweets was associated with much stronger perceptions of a tweet as racist and offensive by left partisans. We found that political identity explained the results far better than other factors like religiosity, race, or gender. Our results are also consistent with the hypothesis that perspectives on race are tied in with individual's social identity expression. The results have implications for our understanding of how social identity, and particularly political identity, shapes how individuals perceive and engage with the world.