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

“These contributors are engaged in an act of solidarity that acknowledges ‘that anyone could be represented as either respectable and innocent or violent and criminal – depending on the photo’ (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015, p. 8).”

“…have shown that public scrutiny on police through various forms of traditional and non-traditional media- such as social media- (Perry, 2009, Bonilla & Rosa 2015, Intravia, Wolff, & Piquero, 2018), are likely to have a long-term impact on how both the public feel about the police and, of…”

“For example, Bonilla & Rosa (2015) point out that the appeal to activism on social networks is influenced by the distorted representation in the media of persons involved in acts of public disobedience.”

“Social media has been instrumental in disseminating information to the public (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Dahlberg 2001; Penney and Dadas 2014).”

“En unos casos, intentará reforzar los poderes establecidos; en otros, movilizar y activar fuerzas opositoras para que luchen contra los poderes creados, especialmente cuando estos gobiernos manifiestan posturas intransigentes (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015; Castells, 2012).”

“For example, in their analysis of the social media response to the extrajudicial 2014 execution of Michael Brown, Bonilla and Rosa (2015) describe how strategic Twitter use by Ferguson residents and African Americans nationwide elevated the incident into the media spotlight through targeted use of the #Ferguson hashta…”

“Drawing on ethnographic and case study approaches to social media data (e.g. Murthy 2008; Morrison 2014; Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Steele 2016; Brown et al. 2017), I examine shaming practices across posts from 2013 to 2015 on the Tumblr blogs ‘whitegirlswithbindis.tumblr.com’,…”

“Informed by ethics debates in the literature on cyber-ethnography (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015; Hine, 2015), we exclude posts by more materially vulnerable social media users such as PhD students and postdoctoral scholars, as well as material from Facebook because, unlike Twitter or Reddit, posts are…”

“External events have the potential to introduce new topics of conversation (i.e. speech genres) as well as to shift pre-existing ones (cf. Bonilla and Rosa, 2015).”

“…information about protests across the nation (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015), which also sparked online discussions about police brutality, combatting the negative media narratives about Brown and historicizing him on the timeline of police-involved shootings of unarmed Black people (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“Further, the use of hashtags and Twitter have contributed to spreading activism and participation regarding political and social themes (e.g., Sharma, 2012; Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Rambukkana, 2015a; Dobrin, 2020; Sebeelo, 2021).”

“For example, #Ferguson and #HandsUpDontShoot, hashtags that arose around the murder of Michael Brown in the US, gave marginalized citizens the opportunity to protest police brutality and media representations of their concerns [6].”

“In other words, ‘hashtags have the intertextual potential to link a broad range of tweets on a given topic or disparate topics as part of an intertextual chain, regardless of whether, from a given perspective, these tweets have anything to do with one another’ (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015: 5).”

“While social media has helped to empower voices from the margins (Bonilla and Rosa 2015), it has also emboldened alt-right and neonationalists groups to spread moral panics about the perceived decline of white purity and homogeneity.”

“Social media campaigns spontaneously initiated by citizens—not only criticized law enforcement’s maltreatment of people of color but also identified biases in media coverage of fatal encounters with the police (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Fews, 2017; Freelon et al., 2016; Jackson, 2016).”

“In this article, I draw on long-term participant observation in New York and Puerto Rico, as well as in-depth interviews and digital ethnography (see Boellstorff 2008; Boellstorff et al. 2012; Bonilla and Rosa 2015 for discussion on methods).”

“It redefines protest dynamics, transforming how movements organise and disseminate their messages (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Castells 2012; Tufekci 2018).”

“…indicates social media users intentionally monitor hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter to stay current on new cases of police brutality without the in fl uence of mainstream media (Brown et al., 2017) and to facilitate the development of shared political identity and space (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“…then became platforms for documenting and challenging narratives of individuals that were often misrepresented in mainstream media (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015) and created a pathway for Black youth to voice their experiences in what Bonilla and Rosa (2015) refer to as “hashtag activism,” ushering…”

“These movements allow individuals to engage collectively as communities (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015) perhaps offering a sense of belonging, empowerment, and support in order to cope.”

“Many posts referenced the United States.”

“Scholars indicated the significance of “distributive framing” enabled via hashtags where problems and solutions were discussed within the non-hierarchical and decentralized networks (Bonila and Rosa 2015; Chong 2019a; Jackson et al. 2020).”

“By the end of the month, that number had increased to eight million (Bonilla and Rosa 2015).”

“In some cases activists have successfully amplified their messages to and through legacy media (Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2018), but messages may be mirepresented or distorted by the mainstream (Bonilla and Rosa 2015).”

“This research also contributes to scholarship that explores how Black people use online spaces that counter dominant cultural narratives that position Black people as inferior (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Brock, 2012; Florini, 2014; Pinckney et al., 2018).”

“In addition, using hashtags, prefixed by the # symbol with a keyword or keywords, has become a common tagging method to help social media users associate tweet messages and share certain events or contexts (Bonilla and Rosa 2015).”

“Many of the protests were organized and led by youth themselves using #Ferguson (see Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“First, insofar as digital information is seen as ‘an extension of a person’ (Burnap et al., 2015: 96–97), ethical considerations arise regarding the status of Facebook and Twitter posts as published texts or the confidential data of human subjects (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015).”

“They have spread on social media— particularly Twitter, with the hashtag serving as an “indexical” marker to perpetuate the conversation of production and sharing (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015).”

“…public square to engage in the contestation of dominant narratives and critical social analyses, much like social media protests emerging on Instagram during the Women ’ s March (Einwohner & Rochford, 2019) or Twitter after the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Hill, 2018).”

“So engaged can mean directed at current political events (e.g., Besnier, 2019; Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Eriksen, 2020; Gusterson, 2017; Holmes & Castañeda, 2016), but it should also mean collaboration with nonanthropologists in welfare projects.”

“…as being considered less valuable or productive than traditional protesting, it can produce meaningful resistance that can break into the larger public sphere, both digital and physical (Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa 2015; Hill 2018; Sarah Jackson, Moya Bailey and Brooke Foucault Welles 2020).”

“Scholars have also explored how Black people use social media to resist hegemonic structures and express sociopolitical needs (Bailey, 2021; Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Calhoun, 2020; Eschmann, 2023; Freelon et al., 2016, 2018; Jackson et al., 2018, 2020; McIlwain, 2019; Williams, 2020).”

“…White and Malm, 2020), called for not only an end to police brutality, but for the application of all available criminal justice accountability mechanisms, from internal discipline to arrest, indictment, prosecution, and conviction (see Bonilla and Rosa, 2015; Mateescu et al., 2016; Smith, 2017).”

“At times, the users of social media are able to overwhelm the narrative and dictate the story (Bonilla & Rosa 2015).”

“In their use of the Internet, religious activists are not much different from other actors who use various social media platforms to organise and manage political mobilisation for protests or other public activities (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Hirschkind 2011).”

“Through these two hashtags, Twitter users were able to gain great attention from the world community regarding racist acts and human rights violations by United States police officers to black citizens in the country [2] [3].”

“(Press of fi cer, city F) Regarding the perception of scandals concerning brutal-ity or racism, it is evident that SM increase the accountability of the police by facilitating omnipresent transparency (Bonilla and Rosa, 2015).”

“Social media also supports the documentation of state-sanctioned violence (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015), intervening not only into the representational realm but also enacting concrete change.”

“Bonilla and Rosa (2015) explored digital protest and hashtag ethnography in the context of racial politics, demonstrating how social media platforms enable youth to shape narratives and organise actions.”

“In her examination of television news coverage of human rights from 1990-2009, Brandle (2015) found very little coverage of human rights in television news in the US, and that even those topics that received coverage were usually international, not domestic, and almost never covered in-depth.”

“Emerging qualitative and quantitative research into the public discussion of BLM use social media (especially Twitter) as source material (Bonilla and Rosa 2015).”

“Social media is uniquely placed to see prevailing attitudes (specifically African American and Latinx) towards police particularly after incidents of police misconduct (Bonilla and Rosa 2015).”