The Swarm versus the Grassroots: places and networks of supporters and opponents of Black Lives Matter on Twitter.
While activists have effectively used the #blacklivesmatter hashtag to organize protests against police brutality and racism, this success has also drawn out many who use the hashtag to express their opposition. How do supporters of the Movement for Black Lives and their opponents coordinate on Twit...
| Published in: | Social Movement Studies Vol. 22; no. 2; pp. 171 - 190 |
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| Main Authors: | , , |
| Format: | Article |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Mar2023
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=161688599&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 161688599 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 14742837 J5V jtl: Social Movement Studies issn: 14742837 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Mar2023 vid: 22 iid: 2 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 161688599 10.1080/14742837.2022.2031954 ppf: 171 ppct: 19 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T – @attributes: type: P size: 1.9MB tig: atl: The Swarm versus the Grassroots: places and networks of supporters and opponents of Black Lives Matter on Twitter. aug: au: van Haperen, Sander Uitermark, Justus Nicholls, Walter affil: Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Department of Urban Planning Policy and Design, University of California Irvine, Irvine, California, United states su: Activism Grassroots movements Metropolis Police brutality Communities Black Lives Matter movement Swarm intelligence sug: subj: Activism Grassroots movements Metropolis Police brutality Communities Black Lives Matter movement Swarm intelligence keyword: Black Lives Matter grassroots networks social media social movements swarm Black Lives Matter grassroots networks social media social movements swarm ab: While activists have effectively used the #blacklivesmatter hashtag to organize protests against police brutality and racism, this success has also drawn out many who use the hashtag to express their opposition. How do supporters of the Movement for Black Lives and their opponents coordinate on Twitter? Drawing on a corpus of 18.5 million tweets, this paper compares coordination among supporters and opponents of #blacklivesmatter in terms of relations and spatialities. We elaborate two different models of coordination: the swarm and the grassroots. Compared to their adversaries, supporters of #blacklivesmatter are more strongly rooted in places and embedded in local relations, suggesting that their online activism builds on grassroots communities. Opponents can be differentiated into two categories. One group consists of conservatives that are rooted in places but in a markedly different geography than supporters; they are more often located outside of major cities and outside of the coastal states. A second group of digitally networked extreme right opponents coordinates more in the fashion of a swarm: they synchronize without being rooted in places or embedded in local relations. These findings demonstrate that movements and countermovements benefit from the affordances of social media in different ways. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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