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

“…highly racialized discourses with regards to what are deemed “legitimate” and “illegitimate” forms of political expression (Blackstone et al., 2017; Mills, 2017), as well as the diverse ways in which social media was mobilized by supporters and opponents of the protesters (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“The timeline feature of the site with short updates allows for on-the-ground posts, as research on protests and activism has shown (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“This could have hindered the ability to raise awareness of the issue, encourage debate, affiliate individuals with a community, and integrate resources from the Internet via social media (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Yang, 2016; Xiong et al., 2019).”

“For instance, researchers have gravitated toward “hashtag ethnography” as a means for performing linguistic anthropological analyses of protest responses (e.g. Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Housley et al., 2018; Stornaiuolo & Thomas, 2017).”

“Bell & Hartmann, 2007), social (Apfelbaum et al., 2008), political (Jardina, 2019), professional (Kalev et al., 2006), and digital lives (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“This perhaps reflects a deeper resistance towards openness, transparency and public accountability for fear of repressive forces being exposed (Bonner 2009, Bonilla and Rosa 2015, Stamati et al. 2015).”

“First created and employed by queer women of color activists in 2013, Black Lives Matter began as a hashtag on Twitter and social media use has been one ongoing organizing strategy within the movement (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Garza, 2014; Lindsey, 2015).”

“In terms of promoting the well-being of those oppressed, extant research discusses the role of the individual and the context (e.g., Brodsky et al. 2011), but there is limited research on the way context influences individuals’ response to oppression (Case and Hunter 2012).”

“…examined the #IfTheyGunned MeDown campaign on Twitter, in which Black users shared side-by-side images of themselves in a moment of success and the criminalizing image that would be circulated by the media if they were killed by police (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Everbach, Clark, and Nisbett 2018).”

“Therefore, this can be a contribution to research that focuses on digital content (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“…were participating in #Ferguson, as they tweeted in real time about the unfolding events, rallied supporters to join various hashtag campaigns . . .” Bonilla and Rosa (2015) concluded that social media platforms have become powerful tools for recording and inspiring episodes of police brutality.”

“Although incidents of racial discrimination in the United States have been made more widely visible online in the recent decade (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015), families have and will continue to serve as the first line of support for Black American adolescents.”

“In both ordinary and extraordinary ways, workers ’ social media use, labor activism through cultural performances, and campaigns form an archive of protest that is pedagogically, aesthetically and politically aggravative (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015).”

“More broadly, while social networking sites might expand the range of sources of information available to users (Leeper, 2020) and provide alternative ways of organizing social movements (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015), there remain questions about their actual effects (Feezell and Ortiz, 2021).”

“Especially as Black communities use their voices through social media to get coverage of Black Americans killed to get justice (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Richardson, 2021; Walker, 2021).”

“Bonilla and Rosa (2015) explore the social media campaign following the 2014 death in Ferguson, Missouri of African American teenager Michael Brown in the context of US racial politics.”

“Meanwhile, linguists have long recognized language and communication to be constitutive of identities and social action, but have only just begun to examine collective action contexts (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015) and environmental beliefs and actions (Stibbe, 2014).”

“Across the political spectrum, individuals hoping to achieve change have taken to the streets, the papers, and the Internet to garner support for their cause (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015; Walsh, 2000).”

“…social movements (Castells, 2012; Powell et al., 2018), which have used them not only to visually expose police brutality and the repression of dissent (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015), but also, and more generally, to campaign and raise awareness of protests (Theocharis et al., 2015; Vicari, 2013).”

“Scholars are relying on social media to investigate contemporary cultural phenomena while arguing that published and distributed content on social media platforms may reflect people’s beliefs and behaviors (e.g. Bonilla and Rosa, 2015).”

“…framed the role of virtual musical care as a response to the broader challenges facing Black and African Diasporic communities during the pandemic, particularly the way in which entrenched racial inequality manifests in unequal access to care (Alcabes, 2020; Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Warren, 2016).”

“The social media use of IDF personnel, however, can also form a compelling “counternarrative” (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015, p. 6) to this often-stereotyped understandings of what military service looks and feels like for the average soldier serving in the IDF.”

“…discrimination, or derogatory text, images, and/or symbols present in online settings that target or exclude an individual or their racial group (Tynes et al., 2012), is pervasive and associated with a range of deleterious outcomes (see, e.g., Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Umaña-Taylor et al., 2015).”

“…on (1) identifying social practices associated with the use of hashtagging as antirape communication (Rentschler 2014); (2) online framing of TWP case (Rapp et al. 2010); and (3) performative force/performativity of #SisterIdobelieveyou (Bonilla and Rosa 2015) regarding belonging and believing.”

“Through this research, I also engaged in digital ethnography, the relatively newer study of digital places, cultures, and communities, which involves active, extended, and systematic exchanges with and participation within those communities (Postill & Pink, 2012; Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“The use of the hashtag has both ‘clerical and semiotic’ (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015, p. 5) function and ultimately facilitates an ‘intertextual chain’ (p. 5) of protest and social commentary.”

“Tweets were thus collected that contained both #Scandal and either #BlackLivesMatter or #Ferguson, the two hashtagsmost commonly associatedwith the issue of systemic racism (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“…of user-generated content on SNSs has proven to be a useful tool in examining how users relate to different aspects of reality, such as politics or media representations of certain events (Asur and Huberman, 2010; Bonilla and Rosa, 2015; Hille and Bakker, 2014; van der Meer and Verhoeven, 2013).”

“As a field site for examining Asian American politics, hashtags “performatively frame” racial meaning as well as archiving and indexing racial discourses in an “intertextual chain” (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“The public’s familiarity with these incidents stemming from extensive media coverage ensures that these cases play a prominent role in shaping public discourse on police effectiveness and legitimacy (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Camp & Heatherton, 2016).”

“All of this will help us to understand how the current feminist crowds use hashtags as a toolbox for activism, erasing the sharp distinction between online and offline worlds, given that both spheres are heavily interdependent (Bonila & Rosa, 2015; Van Laer & Van Aelst, 2010).”

“Measured against this complex backdrop of a legitimacy crisis in a postmodern era of oppositional social and political movements, and a renewed emphasis on public accountability (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015), the stakes for these analyses could not be higher.”

“H (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“tactic to symbolically justify activism (Bonilla and Rosa 2015).”

“…authoritarian contexts to organize as online movements, at least initially minimizing the negative effects of repression on movement participation (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Earl and Kimport 2008; Fischer 2016; Martini 2018; Mattoni and Trer e 2014; Milkman 2017; Moscato 2016; Ofori-Parku and…”

“…diagnostic value: “The only way to really know what these tweets were ‘about’ was to view them in the context of the individual tweeters themselves: when they were posting, what they had previously posted, who they had begun following, and what they were retweeting” (Bonilla and Rosa (2015) p. 7).”

“The case has similarities to the “ justice ” movements in Guatemala (Harlow, 2012), USA (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015) or Tunisia (Wulf, Misaki, et al., 2013), which continuously moved between the online and offline world and followed the Sandoval-Almazan and Ramon (2014) model.”

“We use the hashtags the text in the captions of the posts, as hashtags are one of the methods used to get the theme of the post [4, 8, 44].”

“Bonilla and Rosa (2015) studied the role Black Twitter plays in documenting and sharing instances of police brutality.”

“…of empirical research on the effects of digital political participation on the political system (Delli & Carpini, 2000; Margolis & Resnick, 2000; Bimber, 2001; Krueger, 2002; Ward et al., 2003; Tolbert & McNeal, 2003; Quintelier & Vissers, 2008; Schlozman et al., 2010; Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“This hashtag was a sign system that indexed Black female success, advancement, and empowerment (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“At the same time, research on contemporary social movements has shown the important role of digital technologies and global networks in facilitating protests (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Castells, 2012; Tufekci, 2018; van Haperen et al., 2018).”

“Indeed, the linguistic approach has provided important insights in activism research, especially on hashtag activism (i.e., how people use hashtags on social media to promote awareness of social justice issues; Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Whiting et al., 2021).”

“We can trace these discursive roots to other deeply personal social media movements (e.g. Bonilla and Rosa, 2015; Retallack et al., 2016).”

“As Yarimar Bonilla and Rosa (2015) write, “Whereas in the most mainstream media contexts the experiences of racialized populations are overdetermined, stereotyped, or tokenized, social media platforms such as Twitter offer sites for collectively constructing counternarratives and reimagining group identities” (p. 6).”