What Kind of Movement is Black Lives Matter? The View from Twitter

Abstract

Hundreds of grassroots protests have taken place across the United States under the banner of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement since 2013. This paper examines the public Twitter feeds of six social movement organizations (SMOs) affiliated with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in order to ascertain the nature of the movement from the standpoint of theories of contentious politics. The main finding from the three content analysis studies presented in the paper is that the core activists of the BLM movement use Twitter primarily for expressive communication. Another key finding is that the SMOs examined in this study generated more tweets that framed the movement using the rights-based language of liberalims than frames about gender, racial, and LGBTQ identities. Finally, the SMOs rarely used Twitter to mobilize their followers to engage in contentious politics. Moreover, when they do seek to mobilize their adherents, they tend to do so with an eye toward stimulating participation in the extant political system.

Which Identity Frames Boost Support for and Mobilization in the #BlackLivesMatter Movement? An Experimental Test

“…What is important to note here is that, while we do not necessarily see an increase for women and LGBTQ+ members in the content of their letters, we also do not see a decrease in the willingness to ask for support as a result of the intersectional treatments among men and non-LGBTQ+ members. consistently centering gender and LGBTQ+ identities in the social movement frames that they deploy to reach their adherents (Jackson 2016;Tillery 2019b). As we have seen, the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement believe that this type of signification is the key to expanding support for and participation in their movement (Garza 2014).…”

“…As is often the case when new movements emerge (Gusfield 1994, 59;Zald 1992), the Black Lives Matter movement has also become the subject of scholarly inquiry about how its origins, tactics, and effects fit into existing theoretical paradigms and how it is understood by others (Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016;Harris 2015;Lebron 2017;Merseth 2018;Rickford 2016;Taylor 2016;Tillery 2019b). The consensus within this burgeoning literature is that the Black Lives Matter movement is akin to the New Social Movements-like Germany's antinuclear movement or the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States-that have emerged in advanced industrialized societies since the 1980s (Harris 2015, 35-36;Rickford 2016, 35-36;Taylor 2016, 145-148, 156-159;Tillery 2019b). Under this formulation, we can expect the activists associated with the Black Lives Matter movement to evince less concern with mobilizing resources to affect public policy debates or shift the trajectory of political institutions than did their predecessors in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s (Johnston, Larana, and Gusfield 1994;Melucci 1989;Pichardo 1997).…”

No Justice! Black Protests? No Peace: The Racial Nature of Threat Evaluations of Nonviolent #BlackLivesMatter Protests

“…We argue that it is possible that similar effects shape perceptions of racialized protests. BLM protests are often portrayed as violent despite the fact that the organization has adopted a stance of nonviolence (Tillery, 2019). This potential for violence is reinforced by media coverage that uses inflammatory, hyperbolic frames designed to sensationalize, delegitimize, and demonize protesters (McLeod, 2007;McLeod and Hertog, 1992;Gitlin, 2003;Leopold and Bell, 2017).…”

“…Nonviolent protests have been at the center of Black-interest advocacy for nearly a century (Francis, 2014(Francis, , 2018Thurston, 2018). However, while groups-like #BlackLives-Matter (BLM)-organize and demonstrate in a peaceful manner, there is no guarantee that onlookers will perceive their efforts as peaceful (Tillery, 2019). We propose that this phenomenon can be largely attributed to perceptions of group threat.…”

Racial Liberalism Resurgent: Connecting Multi-Racial Protests and Electoral Politics Today

“…While it is true that similar to today the spark for many of the protests of the late 1960s was outrage over police brutality directed primarily at African-American males, the recent wave of protests looks different in one very important respect. As Sugrue (2020) has noted, in contrast to the exclusively Black composition of the participants in the late 1960s protests that were responding to police brutality, the largely Black protesters of #BlackLivesMatter that rose up after the 2014 police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO and Eric Garner in Staten Island, have now been joined by a racially diverse set of allies who for a variety of reasons support that resistance (see Lopez Bunyasi and Smith 2019; Tillery 2019).…”