An Evolution of Hashtags: A Comparative Analysis of Hashtag Usage Following the Deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd

Abstract

Recent instances of racial injustice and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement have spurred conversations about police reform across the United States. Exposure to police aggression through the second-hand accounts of family members, friends, and the media is known to shape individuals’ perceptions of law enforcement. However, it remains unclear whether social media platforms can also facilitate vicarious exposure to racialized police violence. The current study addresses this gap by focusing on patterns of hashtag usage in a sample of over 350,000 tweets related to law enforcement. Tweets in our sample were posted following the murders of Michael Brown in 2014 and George Floyd in 2020, enabling us to make comparisons across the two sociotemporal contexts. We find that police-related hashtags were more common in 2020 than 2014. Additionally, from the reconceptualization of our data as hashtag co-occurrence networks, we find that Twitter conversations about law enforcement were more likely to occur in disconnected, polarized clusters during the latter period. Findings demonstrate that there is a polarization of online discourse around struggles for racial justice, which limits the ability for social media platforms to expose members to the public to new perspectives on police reform.