Characterizing the Demographics Behind the #BlackLivesMatter Movement

By Alexandra Olteanu, Ingmar Weber, Daniel Gatica-Perez. 2015

55 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The debates on minority issues are often dominated by or held among the concerned minority: gender equality debates have often failed to engage men, while those about race fail to effectively engage the dominant group. To test this observation, we study the #BlackLivesMatter}movement and hashtag on Twitter--which has emerged and gained traction after a series of events typically involving the death of African-Americans as a result of police brutality--and aim to quantify the population biases across user types (individuals vs. organizations), and (for individuals) across various demographics factors (race, gender and age). Our results suggest that more African-Americans engage with the hashtag, and that they are also more active than other demographic groups. We also discuss ethical caveats with broader implications for studies on sensitive topics (e.g. discrimination, mental health, or religion) that focus on users.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019, background): “For instance, in a study of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, about 5% of the Twitter accounts that included the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag in their tweets were organizations (Olteanu et al., 2016).”
Protest Activity Detection and Perceived Violence Estimation from Social Media Images (2017, background): “Recent studies have attempted to measure the demographics of social media users involved in a social movement by analyzing their profile photographs [2, 34].”