The Swarm versus the Grassroots: places and networks of supporters and opponents of Black Lives Matter on Twitter

Abstract

ABSTRACT While activists have effectively used the #blacklivesmatter hashtag to organize protests against police brutality and racism, this success has also drawn out many who use the hashtag to express their opposition. How do supporters of the Movement for Black Lives and their opponents coordinate on Twitter? Drawing on a corpus of 18.5 million tweets, this paper compares coordination among supporters and opponents of #blacklivesmatter in terms of relations and spatialities. We elaborate two different models of coordination: the swarm and the grassroots. Compared to their adversaries, supporters of #blacklivesmatter are more strongly rooted in places and embedded in local relations, suggesting that their online activism builds on grassroots communities. Opponents can be differentiated into two categories. One group consists of conservatives that are rooted in places but in a markedly different geography than supporters; they are more often located outside of major cities and outside of the coastal states. A second group of digitally networked extreme right opponents coordinates more in the fashion of a swarm: they synchronize without being rooted in places or embedded in local relations. These findings demonstrate that movements and countermovements benefit from the affordances of social media in different ways.