#JusticeforGeorgeFloyd: How Instagram facilitated the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests

Abstract

We present and analyze a database of 1.13 million public Instagram posts during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which erupted in response to George Floyd’s public murder by police on May 25. Our aim is to understand the growing role of visual media, focusing on a) the emergent opinion leaders and b) the subsequent press concerns regarding frames of legitimacy. We perform a comprehensive view of the spatial (where) and temporal (when) dynamics, the visual and textual content (what), and the user communities (who) that drove the social movement on Instagram. Results reveal the emergence of non-institutional opinion leaders such as meme groups, independent journalists, and fashion magazines, which contrasts with the institutionally reinforcing nature of Twitter. Visual analysis of 1.69 million photos show symbols of injustice are the most viral coverage, and moreover, actual protest coverage is framed positively, in contrast with combatant frames traditionally found from legacy media. Together, these factors helped facilitate the online movement through three phases, culminating with online international solidarity in #BlackOutTuesday. Through this case study, we demonstrate the precarious nature of protest journalism, and how content creators, journalists, and everyday users co-evolved with social media to shape one of America’s largest-ever human rights movements.

The 2024 Taiwanese Presidential Election on social media: Identity, policy, and affective virality

“…To scrape social media, we searched Facebook and Instagram using CrowdTangle, directly searching for elections-related discourse and the candidates. There was significantly more content on Facebook than on Instagram, which adheres to previous findings about the less political nature of Instagram ( 33 ) and the greater usage of Facebook in Taiwan, relative to Instagram. This served as a control and we focused our analysis on Facebook.…”

The 2024 Taiwanese Presidential Election on Social Media: Identity, Policy, and Affective Virality

“…To scrape social media, we searched Facebook and Instagram using CrowdTangle, directly searching for elections-related discourse and the candidates. There was significantly more content on Facebook than on Instagram, which adheres to previous findings about the less political nature of Instagram [9] and the greater usage of Facebook in Taiwan, relative to Instagram. This served as a control and we focused our analysis on Facebook.…”

Text on Instagram as emerging genre: A framework for analyzing discursive communication on a visual platform

“…Instagram's own recognition of these dynamics as problematic led to refined community guidelines (Cotter et al, 2022;Instagram, 2021aInstagram, , 2021b. Overall, these transformations created a more complex, differentiated, and refracted platform culture than the superficial happy place as which Instagram had long been perceived (Chang, Richardson, & Ferrara, 2022;Sanchez Florenin & Wied, 2021). Al-Rawi (2021, p. 276) has even gone so far as to describe Instagram as a "weaponized platform despite its repu-tation in popular culture as a cool space for young people to post their selfies, food, and travel pictures.…”

“…While social media has always provided space for political expression (Highfield, 2016;Literat & Kligler-Vilenchik, 2019), this was mainly visible in the domains of Facebook and Twitter. Although politicians have been self-promoting on Instagram for a while (Liebhart & Bernhardt, 2017;Parmelee & Roman, 2019), the everyday engagement with social justice issues only recently became more relevant through local and global protest movements (Chang et al, 2022;Neumayer & Rossi, 2018). 1 In the summer of 2020, grassroots ac-tivism became more visible on Instagram than ever before through the worldwide Black Lives Matter movement, and text-heavy slide shows played an important role in it (Nguyen, 2020;Salzano, 2021).…”