In our digital age, with so much discourse happening online, significant conversations around race and racism occur on social media platforms like Twitter. And with the popularity of hashtags including #BlackLivesMatter and #OscarSoWhite, it might be easy to assume those conversations represent the majority of Twitter activity. New research finds they don't, however. In fact, according to the Pew Research Center, tweets about race constitute a small percentage of everything posted to the platform.
The report released Monday by Pew found that between January 1, 2015 and March 31, 2016 there were about 995 million tweets mentioning race – or about on 2.1 million per day. While that may sound like a lot, according to Pew, a total of 500 million tweets were posted to Twitter each day in 2015, making tweets about race a measly 0.04 percent of all tweets sent.
“The analysis found that most of the largest race-focused conversations on Twitter during this period came the day following a major event – after people had time to process the event and formulate their reactions,” Pew further found. “Many of these moments involved incidents in which blacks were the victims of alleged police brutality or the targets of racially-charged violence. At the same time, several of the other largest conversations involved award shows or racial controversies more broadly.”
To be sure, nearly 60 percent of the tweets mentioning race were about events in the news - the church shooting in Charleston and Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy performance, for example. The remaining 40 percent were unrelated to current events but tied to broader themes and users’ personal reflections on discrimination. In fact, more than half of the non-news tweets about race were discussions of history.
Pew’s report also took a deep dive into mentions of the Black Lives Matter movement on Twitter. According to the study, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has been tweeted 11.8 million times since it first appeared on Twitter in 2013 through the end of its study in March of 2016. Pew also reported that #AllLivesMatter, which first appeared in late 2014, has been used 1.5 million times. Interestingly, unlike #BlackLivesMatter, which follows major news trends, the #AllLivesMatter hashtag moves parallel to the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag.
“In contrast to the use of #BlackLivesMatter, posts which used #AllLivesMatter in a positive manner were less likely to connect their posts with a broader social agenda,” said the Pew report. “Only 7% of the tweets using #AllLivesMatter took this position. Notably – and in contrast to the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag – #AllLivesMatter did not have a specific organization backing it or promoting its use in its early stages.”
Instead, Pew uncovered that 13 percent of #AllLivesMatter tweets were posted in defense of individuals and institutions being criticized by Black Lives Matter movement. The majority, however (33 percent of tweets that contained #AllLivesMatter) were criticizing the very premise of the hashtag.
