Looking Back to Move Forward: A Review of Literature to Identify #BlackLivesMatter as the Virtual Community That Sparked a Movement

George Zimmerman, a white neighborhood watchman, was acquitted in July of 2013 for the murder of unarmed African American teenager Trayvon Martin. Upset by this news, many people took to social media to express their discontent. A Facebook post from one user in particular, Alicia Garza, resulted in the hashtag #blacklivesmatter. It wasn’t until the shooting death of another African American teenager, Michael Brown, that the hashtag gained momentum on other social media sites. This paper argues that the use of the hashtag #blacklivesmatter on Twitter created a meeting place, free from temporal and spatial boundaries, for people to organize against and combat the racial injustices imparted upon the Black community. Through a review of literature on virtual communities, this paper identifies the hashtag #blacklivesmatter as a virtual community which 1) increased the visibility of these injustices imparted upon the Black community and 2) catalyzed the hashtag #blacklivesmatter into a social movement.