Social media platform Twitter played a critical role in helping Black Lives Matter organize and spread information during the height of the movement, according to a new study.
The analysis from the Australian National University looked at 118 million tweets over a two-year period from 2020 to 2021.
“For activists, we can see that the protests acted as an indicator for the number of tweets, but also the number of tweets acted as an indicator for the protests,” said lead researcher Prof. Colin Klein.
“You can clearly see the patterns of political engagement. “Activists drive and are driven by protests, while the right reacts more to the political context,” he said in a statement.
The most common hashtags identified by the team were #BlackLivesMatter, #GeorgeFloyd, #BreonnaTaylor, #Black and #ICantBreathe. These hashtags helped the movement go viral.
Black Lives Matter has been criticized for hijacking legitimate concerns about excessive police force to advance Critical Race Theory, while inciting violent protests in the United States and around the world—as well as acts such as “kneeling” and the toppling of statues of historical figures.
Critical race theory argues that the United States is systematically racist and oppressive, with whites supposedly dominating blacks.
However, this theory has been criticized for sharing the same nuances and ideas as the Marxist and Communist regimes, while ignoring the real issues affecting black communities.
Right-wing, left-wing Twitter users react differently to crises
Further, the team found that they identified three distinct groups of commenters using Twitter: right-wing, center-left, and left-wing activists.
The study concluded that left-wing activists were effective in generating increased, short-term activity on the platform to gain attention, but this would quickly dissipate.
In contrast, right-leaning accounts were often reactionary to left-wing activity and were more stable and moderate.
“This is similar to what researchers have found after, say, a mass shooting in the US. You get a lot of attention about gun control very early on, but a much longer-term interest in buying guns,” Klein said.
The team noticed similar patterns of activity after the killing of George Floyd in May 2020.
“We also saw a shift in the way right-wing accounts were framing things. At first, they were more divided and there was a lot of pro-police rhetoric. After the killing of George Floyd, it was flooded with ‘activists as terrorists,’” he said.
Musk divides the left
Social media platform Twitter has routinely been criticized for censoring content from right-leaning or conservative commentators, most notably removing former US President Donald Trump from the platform – despite allowing Chinese Communist Party officials and the Taliban to remain. .
As a result, the recent acquisition of Twitter by billionaire innovator Elon Musk was hailed by leading conservatives, including Republicans Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), as a victory for free speech.
Musk immediately fired the CEO and executive board and is said to be revamping the company’s operations — while launching a new subscription service — to make the platform more profitable.
In response, former CEO Jack Dorsey’s new platform, Bluesky, began to expand after news of the acquisition, suggesting that left-leaning users may choose to leave Twitter.
Despite the speed of Musk’s Twitter housecleaning, Jason Miller, CEO and founder of Gettr—a Twitter competitor launched in July 2021—was cynical that the social media platform could be changed.
“Twitter can’t escape. It’s a dying platform. And even Elon Musk doesn’t really believe in Twitter … If he could get away with overpaying for Twitter and bypass that impending filing, he would do it in a heartbeat,” Miller said in a statement.
“Twitter’s numbers are not real. They know it, we know it, and most importantly, Elon Musk knows it. That is why he asked them over and over again.”
Miller said real change at Twitter could only be achieved if “every coder, every engineer and every moderator” was fired as political discrimination was “so deeply ingrained” in the company’s culture.
Gettr recorded a 50 percent increase in user numbers over the past year, beating MeWe and Parler. The platform reports a user base of 6.5 million worldwide.
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Daniel Y. Teng is based in Sydney. It focuses on national issues including federal policy, the response to COVID-19 and Australia-China relations. Got a tip? Contact him at [email protected].
