Searching Racism after George Floyd

Abstract

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His death led to U.S.-wide protest that would eventually cross borders, spanning multiple continents. The transnational diffusion of protest and movement frames is a recognized phenomenon in the study of contention. Less well documented are the consequences of such protest for political interest; absent survey data, this is difficult to measure. One alternative is to use Internet search data. This visualization uses Google Trends to document variation in search interest for “racism” across 101 countries and 32 languages during the period before and after George Floyd’s killing. In the majority of countries, there was significantly increased search interest that was sustained for at least two weeks. The findings suggest that transnational protest diffusion may lead to global increases in political interest.

Examining the effects of the killing of George Floyd by police in the United States on attitudes of Black Londoners: A replication

“…Specifically, while Black Londoners showed more negative evaluations post-event compared to White Londoners, there was no significant difference between Black and Asian Londoners' evaluations of police following the event. This may be because the vast scope of the global media response to the murder of George Floyd led to greater exposure of the incident across population groups (Barrie, 2020;The Economist, 2020). The slightly larger effect among nonwhites suggests that the event resonated with Asian residents to a similar degree as with Black residents.…”

Protest policing and public perceptions of police: Evidence from a natural experiment in Germany

“…Google trends in particular are considered valid indicators of issue salience (Mellon, 2014) and have been analyzed alongside traditional survey data in many previous UESD studies (Ares & Hernández, 2017;Nägel & Lutter, 2021;Reny & Newman, 2021;Thompson, 2021). Google trends data can also serve as a proxy for political interest in the absence of survey data (Barrie, 2020).…”

Political sociology in a time of protest

“…Figure 2 displays some examples of this reporting alongside time-series data from Google Trends showing that English-language news interest in 'protest' has steadily increased since measurement began in 2007, with peaks in 2011, 2016, 2019 and 2020. 1 Search trends in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests of 2020 point similarly to the worldwide resonance of this protest campaign (Barrie, 2020). Contentious claim-making, it seems, has become an ever more routine part of political life.…”