#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States

“While such platforms allow for a rapid dissemination of ideas and concepts (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Bode 2016), there are some, both in academia and industry that have raised ethical concerns about using social media for political purposes.”

“…killedMichael Brown, an unarmedAfricanAmerican teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri, Wilson suggested that Brown’s stature was monstrous and threatening despite the fact that he and Brown were the same height and he was the only one armed with a deadly weapon in their altercation (Bonilla & Rosa 2015).”

“…and data limitations such as non-representativeness, API restrictions and the shortcomings of keyword and hashtag-based studies (Black et al. 2016; Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Carney 2016; Johnson 2018; Miškolci et al. 2020; Munger 2017; Murthy and Sharma 2019; George Mwangi et al. 2018; Oh 2016;…”

“Among other uses, social media allow activists to interact with lawmakers directly, given that many if not most of the latter have Twitter and Facebook accounts (at least in the United States).”

“Finally, Yang (2016) illustrates that use of #blacklivesmatter provides an opportunity for users to engage in narrative agency, that is, to create their own stories and discourse around the term and its meaning (see also Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“More recent work focusing on digital media and digital activism finds that minorities are active in online campaigns (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015), but still less active than whites overall (Elliott & Earl, forthcoming; Best & Krueger, 2005).”

“Such spaces have proven to be valuable sources of solidarity for those from disadvantaged groups (e.g., Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Keller, 2012; Rapp, Button, Fleury-Steiner, & Fleury-Steiner, 2010).”

“…and how it gained virality on Twitter and thus helped shape the conversation around the event and awareness of it (Wang, Liu, and Gao 2016; Woods 2014) as well as the use of hashtags to gain visibility in order to enact social change (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Kangere, Kemitare, andMichau 2017).”

“…in social movements may be overstated (Salvatore 2013; Wojcieszak and Smith 2014), we concede that social media may complement existing social movements and activism (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Salvatore 2013; Wojcieszak and Smith 2014), particularly by increasing awareness of issues (Büscher 2016).”

“…it became the organizing principle and mantra of the protests that swept through the nation in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, by a white police officer in Ferguson, MO (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Jackson and Welles 2016; Taylor 2016, 13 – 15).”

“Bonilla and Rosa (2015) suggested that despite the need for caution, these social media platforms have emerged as powerful sites for documenting state-sanctioned violence and mainstream media portrayals of marginalized communities and racialized bodies because young people now carry the tools with…”

“Over time, BLM has expanded its fight beyond racial police violence to situate itself as “an ideological and political intervention” (Garza 2014; Bonilla and Rosa 2015) that strives to end systemic presence of racial inequality against blacks.”

“Contemporary social change includes digital activism of hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter after Trayvon Martin’s killer was acquitted of murder (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015), #ICantBreathe refers to Eric Garner’s fight for justice against police use of force, and #HandsUpDontShoot is used to show the…”

“…system in both the clerical sense and the semiotic sense” by providing a quick information retrieval system and also “marking the intended significance of an utterance”—users of a hashtag are able to simultaneously “file” and frame their comments to add specific meaning (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015: 5).”

“At the same time, these very same interactions are also algorithmically and semantically displayed in ephemeral meta-field sites, such as the News Feed – a stream of customized contents filtered according to undisclosed computational criteria (see Arvidsson, 2016) – and the internal search engine6 – where posts can be…”

“In conjunction, Keum and Miller (2017) theorized that racism takes on a much more pervasive and abundant presence on the Internet and other scholars have noted the persistence of racist materials on the Internet (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Daniels, 2013; Keum, 2017; Tynes et al., 2008).”

“Discussion When documented by news organizations and widely shared via social media, violent interactions seemingly motivated by racism or prejudice have potential to become major societal events (28).”

“As another measure of support, we created an index including three additional variables: trust in people involved in BLM, trust in BLM leaders, and belief that BLM speaks for the individual.5 On the whole, the sample roughly matches that of African American residents of the United States of America.6 (Table A.1 in the…”

“…only begun to explore the implications for communities prone to violence, both at the hands of gangs and police, of an ability to record and broadcast media from personal devices as events unfold (Bock, 2016; Bonilla and Rosa, 2015; Gonzales, 2014; Neumayer and Stald, 2014; Patton et al., 2017).”

“…(2016), Gaby & Caren (2016), Mausolf (2017) Black Lives Matter De Choudhury et al. (2016), Freelon et al. (2018) Jackson & Foucault Welles (2016) Bonilla & Rosa (2015), Brown et al. (2017), Gallagher et al. (2018) Far-right movements Davidson & Berezin (2018) Caren et al. (2012), Dignam &…”

“It also supplements the existing literature on digital activism in the gig economy (Joyce, 2010; Bonilla and Rosa, 2015; Graham et al., 2017; Chesta et al., 2019; Chen, 2018; Wood et al., 2018) by speci fi cally highlighting the “ backstage activism ” (Treré, 2015; 2020) enabled by this WhatsApp…”

“…how publics can mobilize on social media platforms, specifically Twitter, to raise awareness about injustice, disseminate information about political and social movements, and provide spaces for disenfranchised Others to share experiences (e.g., Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Brock, 2012; Gleason, 2013).”

“2 [h1]ICTs in Relation to Care ICTs have been hailed as technologies of social change at all levels, from transforming intimate relationships (Gershon 2010; Wright and Webb 2011) to spurring revolutions (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Brym et al. 2014; Postill 2014).”

“…collectivities and their reflexive senses of themselves, as with recent studies of antiracist networks forged through hashtag activism on Twitter (Bonilla and Rosa 2015) or the shifting senses of Mazatec identity as circulated online by Day of the Dead songs and commentaries on them (Faudree…”

“…with oppression, including racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, often lead minoritized students to engage in resistance and activism, demanding that institutions create more equitable and just opportunities (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Hope, Keels, & Durkee, 2016; Rhoads, 1997).”

“…media communication” (Modan 2016), “social media ethnography” (Postill and Pink 2012), “ethnographic studies of digital media” (Coleman 2010), “Internet ethnography” (Hine 2000), the “anthropology of online communities” (Wilson and Peterson 2002), and “hashtag ethnography” (Bonilla and Rosa 2015).”

“Nor is there any evidence that would suggest that citizens encountered by police officers would become more (or less) compliant when facing a camera held by a bystander (cf. Bonilla and Rosa, 2015, who provide an ethnographic account of these potentials).”

“Similar to what Bonilla and Rosa described [14], our findings show that hashtags serve diverse purposes within “Twitter activism”—e.”

“Specific to police discrimination, some scholars have argued that individuals may feel they can more freely express themselves via social media than other channels (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Freelon et al., 2016).”

“Social media platforms, computerised recommendation systems and human users can (re)assemble images, videos and text generated at different times, and for diverse purposes, juxtaposing them to create narratives about seemingly coherent, contemporary trends or phenomena (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“M as overly influenced by cyberpolitics, when of course its ideological and strategic characteristics drew from pre-existing movement cultures, the political history of Spain as well as the particular experience of economic crisis in that country (Flesher Fominaya 2015, 2017).”

“For example, parents may refrain their children from wearing hooded sweatshirts (“hoodies”), a type of clothing often deemed emblematic of criminal behavior and deviance (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“Moreover, a drawing posted on Twitter (Figure 2) shows Trayvon and Emmett, who could have been Trayvon’s grandfather, arm in arm, signaling solidarity across the generations.”

“While some managers are also concerned with certain audiences on specific social networking sites, like Twitter, participants indicated some managers are less interested in growing their audiences beyond their current readership, viewership, or listenership, and instead are more focused on satisfying their current aud…”

“Examples of this strategic use of hashtags are the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which stands up to fight violence against black people (e.g. Bonilla and Rosa, 2015) and the #MeToo movement against sexual abuse and harassment (e.g. Brünker et al., 2020).”

“Since then, Black Twitter posts and hashtags, such as #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, #HandsUpDontShoot, and #BlackLivesMatter, have helped mobilize protesters around other instances of racial injustice and police brutality (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“…on #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and the social movement aspects of Black Twitter has focused on “hashtag activism” during the Ferguson uprising (Bonilla and Rosa 2015), assessed the different types of “race talk” that users engaged in on Twitter in the days immediately after Michael Brown’s…”

“Buzzword ethnography—which includes methods such as “interface ethnography” (Ritter, 2021), “hashtag ethnography” (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015), and “appnography” (Cousineau et al.”

“Several ethnographies have analysed the emergence of activism on digital media, particularly revolving around hashtags (mostly on Twitter) such as #Ferguson (Bonilla and Rosa 2015), #MeToo (Pipyrou 2018), and #BlackLivesMatter (Yang 2016).”

“As previously theorized for the world before social media, while protesters would complain about being misconstrued as angry and combatant, this was one of the only ways of gaining media attention and thereby generate awareness through cable television [49, 61].”

“…social issues such as the Black Lives Matter movement have demonstrated how social media has the capacity not just for discursive changes but material changes, effects on both how people think and then how they act upon these thoughts in their offline lives (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Carney 2016).”

“Bonilla and Rosa (2015) explained the role Black twitter played in individual hashtag activism acts like #WeAreTrayvon #HoodiesUp and group hashtag activism acts like #HandsUpDontShoot, #NoAngel, and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown.”

“For, although Twitter activism is said to be fleeting by nature, it is also inherently aggregative (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015: 10).”

“…users who are able to create posts through Twitter—for example, in the studies of Boyd (2010) and Zappavigna (2012)—and from the perspective of the platform’s potential as a mechanism for social activism, which is seen in the work of Keller (2012), Konnelly (2015), and Bonilla and Rosa (2015).”

“Multiple SOC at MU leveraged this hashtag activism and endorsed #BlackLivesMatter as a means to contextualize what Bonilla and Rosa (2015) referred to as a “particular interpretive frame” that served to raise awareness of the prevalence of racism within the MU online environments (p. 5).”

“Bonilla and Rosa (2015) examined protests against the police shooting of an African American teenager in Ferguson, Missouri and pointed out how “social media platforms such as Twitter offer sites for collectively constructing counternarratives and reimagining group identities” (p. 6; see also Yang,…”

“Chu K-H, Unger JB, Allem J-P, et al. Diffusion of mes- sages from an electronic cigarette brand to potential users through Twitter.”

“With affordances including rapid updates, grouping by hashtags, and constantly updating trending topics, the Twitter platform is an ideal site for breaking news and is especially conducive to grassroots social activism (Bonilla and Rosa 2015).”

“…of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man, by a White Ferguson, Missouri police officer, and the subsequent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015), there has been a groundswell of attention paid to race-related incidents, particularly as they relate to interactions with law…”

“When it comes specifically to hashtags, some of them have been more extensively studied than others (e.g., #JeSuisCharlie and #JeNeSuisPasCharlie; Giglietto & Lee, 2016; or #Ferguson; Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”