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Divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter

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  • Ryan J Gallagher
  • Andrew J Reagan
  • Christopher M Danforth
  • Peter Sheridan Dodds

Abstract

Since the shooting of Black teenager Michael Brown by White police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, the protest hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has amplified critiques of extrajudicial killings of Black Americans. In response to #BlackLivesMatter, other Twitter users have adopted #AllLivesMatter, a counter-protest hashtag whose content argues that equal attention should be given to all lives regardless of race. Through a multi-level analysis of over 860,000 tweets, we study how these protests and counter-protests diverge by quantifying aspects of their discourse. We find that #AllLivesMatter facilitates opposition between #BlackLivesMatter and hashtags such as #PoliceLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter in such a way that historically echoes the tension between Black protesters and law enforcement. In addition, we show that a significant portion of #AllLivesMatter use stems from hijacking by #BlackLivesMatter advocates. Beyond simply injecting #AllLivesMatter with #BlackLivesMatter content, these hijackers use the hashtag to directly confront the counter-protest notion of “All lives matter.” Our findings suggest that Black Lives Matter movement was able to grow, exhibit diverse conversations, and avoid derailment on social media by making discussion of counter-protest opinions a central topic of #AllLivesMatter, rather than the movement itself.

Suggested Citation

  • Ryan J Gallagher & Andrew J Reagan & Christopher M Danforth & Peter Sheridan Dodds, 2018. "Divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(4), pages 1-23, April.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0195644
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0195644
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    Cited by:

    1. Jake Lever & Rossella Arcucci, 2022. "Sentimental wildfire: a social-physics machine learning model for wildfire nowcasting," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 5(2), pages 1427-1465, November.
    2. Colin Klein & Ritsaart Reimann & Ignacio Ojea Quintana & Marc Cheong & Marinus Ferreira & Mark Alfano, 2022. "Attention and counter-framing in the Black Lives Matter movement on Twitter," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 9(1), pages 1-12, December.
    3. Pedro Ramaciotti Morales & Jean-Philippe Cointet & Caterina Froio, 2022. "Posters and protesters," Journal of Computational Social Science, Springer, vol. 5(2), pages 1129-1157, November.
    4. Peter Grajzl & Peter Murrell, 2021. "Characterizing a legal–intellectual culture: Bacon, Coke, and seventeenth-century England," Cliometrica, Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History, Association Française de Cliométrie (AFC), vol. 15(1), pages 43-88, January.

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