Twitter Corpus of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and Counter Protests: 2013 to 2021

Abstract

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized social movement protesting violence against Black individuals and communities, with a focus on police brutality. The movement gained significant attention following the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd in 2020. The #BlackLivesMatter social media hashtag has come to represent the grassroots movement, with similar hashtags counter protesting the BLM movement, such as #AllLivesMatter, and #BlueLivesMatter. We introduce a data set of 63.9 million tweets from 13.0 million users from over 100 countries which contain one of the following keywords: BlackLivesMatter, AllLivesMatter, and BlueLivesMatter. This data set contains all currently available tweets from the beginning of the BLM movement in 2013 to 2021. We summarize the data set and show temporal trends in use of both the BlackLivesMatter keyword and keywords associated with counter movements. Additionally, for each keyword, we create and release a set of Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topics (i.e., automatically clustered groups of semantically co-occuring words) to aid researchers in identifying linguistic patterns across the three keywords.

#RoeOverturned: Twitter Dataset on the Abortion Rights Controversy

“…Protest Mobilization While the role of social media in protest mobilization has been studied for specific wedge issues or events (Ince, Rojas, and Davis 2017;Wolfsfeld, Segev, and Sheafer 2013;Steinert-Threlkeld 2017;Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2018), studies comparing interactions around different protests are sparse (Segerberg and Bennett 2011;Won, Steinert-Threlkeld, and Joo 2017). This dataset can be used in conjunction with other datasets to study complex social movements such as the Black Live Matter movement (Giorgi et al 2022), and capital riots (Kerchner and Wrubel 2021). For example, do these social movements rely on certain agents' call for action?…”

Young Adults’ Distress About Police Brutality Following the Death of George Floyd

“…Floyd’s murder and the ensuing demonstrations garnered significant media attention (Heaney, 2020). Protests and activism following Floyd’s murder were also discussed broadly across social media platforms such as Twitter (Anderson et al, 2020; Giorgi et al, 2020). Social media sites such as Twitter often play a vital role in providing young adults access to news information.…”

Social Movements as Parsimonious Explanations for Implicit and Explicit Attitude Change

“…Although traditional media have thus far been incorporated into relevant studies (via Factiva and LexisNexis, Sawyer & Gampa, 2018; or NY Times Index; Wasow, 2020), future work could utilize social media data to a greater extent to account for movement activism and related public discourse. One excellent resource is the “Twitter Corpus of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and Counter Protests: 2013 to 2020” (Giorgi et al, 2020), which contains 41.8 million tweets from 10 million Twitter users containing BlackLivesMatter, AllLivesMatter, and BlueLivesMatter. Because this corpus also contains anti-BLM tweets, it allows for the investigation of the relative power of BLM vs. counter-BLM movements in predicting attitude changes.…”