On May 25, 2020, a 17-year-old girl named Darnella Frazier used her smartphone to film Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for more than nine minutes. She uploaded the footage of the fatal incident to Facebook. Within two days, the video went viral, sparking global outcry. By June 2, 2020, Brianna Agyemang and Jamila Thomas, two Black women and music executives at Atlantic Records, created the viral hashtag #TheShowMustBePaused. They called on recording artists to use their platforms to draw attention to systemic racism by posting a single Black square on their Facebook and Instagram timelines. Millions of everyday people joined the initiative and did the same in what came to be known as #BlackOutTuesday.
This study provides a snapshot of the Instagram activity leading up to this viral moment, tracking it through its apex and eventual nadir. Our investigation is novel, insofar as #BlackOutTuesday likely marks the first time in the history of social media movements that a visual platform:not a predominantly text-based one like Twitter:took center stage. Twitter has been well-studied since the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. Most of these investigations have focused on textual diffusion, however, ignoring the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. In modern social movements, it is often an incendiary photo or video that galvanizes the public's support for a social justice issue. These images can seem fleeting, however, because ephemeral platforms such as Instagram feature videos that disappear after 24 hours and an endless scroll of content that can be hard to search. This study, therefore, answers a recent call for media scholars to document more visual social media content for scholarly analysis. The data collection we carried yielded a corpus of almost 1.7 million photos obtained during the June 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
Our review of prior literature features three parts. First, we explain how (and why) Twitter was invaluable to the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, while its second wave shifted toward Instagram, according to extensive qualitative work. We then summarize the evolution of Instagram studies to emphasize further why we chose to highlight this emergent site for protest journalism. Lastly, we consider the press concerns of protests and the broader theory of connective action, namely how modality and affordances impact frames of legitimacy and the emergent opinion leaders. Through this frame, our results demonstrate the precarious nature of movement media, and how content creators, journalists, and everyday Instagram users co-evolved their earlier social media practices to report on and shape one of America's largest-ever human rights movements.
The Black Lives Matter movement began in 2013, when George Zimmerman was acquitted for shooting and killing Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager, in Florida. Alicia Garza, a well-known political organizer from Oakland, California, wrote a love letter to Black people after the verdict was announced and posted it on Facebook. She ended it with the sentence, "Black Lives Matter." Her friend and fellow organizer, Patrisse Cullors, added a hashtag to the front of the message and re-broadcast it on Twitter. It would be one more year before the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag went viral in 2014. On August 9, a White police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed an unarmed Black teenager, Mike Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. When police allowed Brown's body to lay in the road for four hours, uncovered in the sweltering summer heat, peaceful protests began. Citizen journalists used the hashtag to document Brown's killing and the community's outrage. Activists used the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to call on the police department to cover up Brown out of respect for his humanity. For the rest of the summer, use of the hashtag soared.
Groups that opposed the new Black Lives Matter movement created counternarrative hashtags, such as #AllLivesMatter (to reject claims of racism in policing) and #BlueLivesMatter (to support law enforcement). An exhaustive study of Twitter discourse found that six major communities relied on Twitter to discuss police brutality in 2014 and 2015: Black Lives Matter activists, Black entertainers, conservatives, bipartisan reporters, legacy media outlets, and young Black Twitter users. Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark (2016) analyzed 40.8 million tweets, more than 100,000 web links, and 40 interviews with frontline activists and allies, and discovered that the vast majority of those who tweeted using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag denounced police brutality. The authors also found that activists who tweeted movement-related news succeeded in educating "casual observers" who either expressed "awe and disbelief at the violent police reactions to the Ferguson protests" or "conservative admissions of police brutality," especially in the cases of Eric Garner and Walter Scott's public police killings. Overall, the research postulated that activists' primary goals for using Twitter were "education, amplification of marginalized voices, and structural police reform".
Subsequent inquiries into the Black Lives Matter movement's use of Twitter in 2016 included how users craft counternarratives to anti-Black racism, how Black feminists hijacked the platform to highlight intersectional struggles, and even how Millennial organizers were departing from the Civil Rights Movement's protest templates to create their own. The Pew Center, for example, reported in 2016 that the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag peaked during the 10 days spanning July 7-17:with nearly 500,000 tweets of the back-to-back killings of Alton Sterlingaily. Studies such as these centered around Twitter as a digital public sphere. In the book Hashtag Activism, for example, the authors argue that the Black Lives Matter movement, and other contemporary Twitter-based movements then, were propelled by strong Twitter communities of Black women. The #GirlLikeUs transgender justice campaign, or the #SayHerName movement to raise awareness about Black women victims of police brutality, flourished and thrived on the platform. As the decade came to a close, the Black Lives Matter movement waned. Although publications such as The New York Times or The Atlantic published end-of-decade pieces on how social media shaped modern protest in the 2010s, the emphasis remained on Twitter's impact:until this study.
In May 2020, Darnella Frazier's cellphone video of George Floyd's murder reinvigorated the Black Lives Matter movement:in the same way that the photographs of Emmett Till's 1955 lynching rebooted the dwindling, post-World War II Civil Rights Movement. In Bearing Witness While Black, Richardson draws these parallels, arguing that pictures and videos have played an outsized role in Black movement-building. Richardson also documents the rise in smartphone video as a tool for political testimony to explain why Black Americans "press record" as a means to fight back against systemic oppression in the US.
Media pundits and scholars have in recent years begun exploring Instagram's affordances, and early content largely fell outside of the scope of social movement media. An early probe into the world of Instagram endeavored to explain how users' "experiences of production, sharing, and interaction with the media they create" are mediated by the "interfaces of particular social media platforms". This study was one of the first to use computational analysis and visualizations to explore Instagram's social and cultural patterns. The team compared the visual signatures of 13 different global cities using 2.3 million Instagram photos, and honed in on 200,000 Instagram photos that were uploaded in Tel Aviv, Israel. While the three-month study confirmed that one could ascertain people's activities and political habits from the geotagged photos, there was not a sustained look at a particular viral moment.
Other Instagram studies from the 2010s followed a similar pattern. Scholars often investigated what images people uploaded to Instagram or how to detect the age of a user from their photos, but stopped short of analyzing Instagram photos during moments of political unrest. Still other studies elucidated the effects of pop culture, or the five primary social and psychological motives of Instagram use: "social interaction, archiving, self-expression, escapism, and peeking". Recent studies on political movements followed en suite. Meme pages and celebrities, for instance, have been recently characterized to spark instances of political participation in Morocco, maintain partisan identity in Canada, promote public health behavior, or facilitate misinformation. Recent work has focused on the growing role of visuals in protests directly, such as the case of the Hong Kong Protests in 2019. Amid the virality of the #BlackOutTuesday hashtag on Instagram we decided to study the visual platform, finally, in a political context.
The backdrop of the global discourse about Mr. Floyd's controversial video was not the only reason for the shift away from Twitter and toward Instagram. Instagram content is four times more likely to be geotagged than Twitter content, which provides us invaluable insight into when and where the #BlackOutTuesday groundswell occurred. Instagram provided the right lens for studying the visual dimension of this phenomenon. Recent studies have also shown the importance of racial presentation in mediating (mis)information dissemination, which may be more evident in the visual mode. Furthermore, the Twitter discourse we analyzed seemed more like "ambient journalism" that was always on, rather than the more intentional educational and call-to-action-style posts that we observed casually on Instagram.
Lastly, we shifted our focus toward Instagram because the people did too. Many of the #BlackOutTuesday posts on Twitter linked back to an original post on Instagram, using either Facebook's native algorithmic syncing tool or the IFTTT (IfThisThenThat) application. We were also intrigued by Instagram's many technological affordances. The platform remains a walled garden, which does not make it easy for users to hyperlink outward. That is, Twitter can reference Instagram posts but not vice versa, creating an asymmetry in information flow. Trapping captive audiences within Instagram gives the platform enormous power over what the user sees:in that content is mediated solely through one platform. Without trigger warnings or decency screens over controversial content, Instagram users in June 2020 faced an increased likelihood of viewing potentially harmful content while scrolling through their feeds. Likewise, users found that they were beholden also to Instagram's opaque user guidelines around protest posts. A USA Today piece reported that Black users were suspended from Facebook for even talking about racism. Similarly, Instagram and TikTok apologized for algorithmically silencing Black voices.
Our last preoccupation with Instagram during the #BlackOutTuseday campaign centered around protesters who were captured in the viral pictures. Their visibility meant that their chances of being added to police's facial recognition databases or other forms of AI-based cataloguing grew. Much like the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law protests in Hong Kong:when activists combatted doxxing by communicating through an high-level encryption app, Telegram:we observed users creating 24-hour ephemeral Instagram "Stories" that were designed to disappear, presumably to limit the retrieval of their movement media.
There is certainly the perspective that #BlackOutTuesday was performative and did not directly advance the movement. For instance, a recent study found, through 20 interviews of wellness influencers, that sharing of the square was for maintaining credibility with their following base. However, their work focuses primarily on influencers, users that have achieved a certain level of popularity, and in wellness, which is an even more specific slice of Instagram. Moreover, the greater point is that there was sufficient demand for influencers to navigate the movement, which creates a larger presence on Instagram than previously, whether solidarity is performative or not.
Modality, taken from semiotics, refers to the format for which information is stored, prior to presentation. The difference between Instagram and Twitter is thus the visual and textual mode, respectively. As such, Instagram is poised to advance research on how visuals aid social movements when held in comparison with the textual mode. We are particularly interested in two dimensions: framing and opinion leadership. First, the visual modality of engagement:through photos and video: demands a different form of participation than through text. Per the adage "a picture contains a thousand words," visuals are dense and powerful message holders. Studies have shown visual messages are more temporally efficient and amplify the affective reaction and reinforce textual content. Beyond photos, injustice symbols can serve as a force that extends political efforts beyond local, even national, accounts.
More critically, this form of engagement bears many similarities to the traditional relationship between press and protest. Long-standing work has shown institutional news media portrayals delegitimize collective action. As conceptualized, images of protest are distributed by legacy media sources. Protestors in turn sought their attention through disruptive or combative tactics, which led to condemnation, and thus delegitimization. The participation of citizen journalists, theoretically, would remove this necessity, and recent scholarship explores this possibility. A recent experimental study finds visual frames important for increasing support and identification toward protesters.
Apart from the modality itself, the legacy media has traditionally occupied opinion leadership, and this flow of information through elites has garnered significant attention since the proposition of two-step flow from more than half a century ago. While research that intersect visuals in social movements on digital media remains sparse compared to textual analysis, there are still numerous studies. For instance, Neumayer and Rossi (2018) analyze images recently studied photos and videos of Twitter during the Blockupy protests in Frankfurt. However, they found reinforcement in regard to the politics of visibility, where institutional and official accounts still garnered the most attention (retweets). Instagram, with its less-public interface and limited hyper-linkage could poise as a counterpoint to Twitter's organizational dynamics.
While offline events-such as widespread protests-certainly also occurred, contemporary social movements are coordinated significantly through online spaces, such as social media. Various reports have highlighted the importance of Instagram. If our assumption that a) online social platforms are important to protest organizing and b) Instagram has taken an outsized role compared to prior movements and Twitter, then answers to these questions can address how solidarity can be in part attributed to shifts in framing and shift in opinion leaders found on Instagram.
As such, our investigation into Instagram offers rich comparative insight toward a) how the modality of engagement shifts frames of legitimacy, and b) the nature and role of emergent opinion leaders. We offer the following research questions and hypotheses:
Characterization: What were the temporal trends of June 2020's second wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, in terms of frequency, geography, and textual content?
Injustice Symbols and Legitimization: What were the top shared images on Instagram, and how do they semantically, affectively, and symbolically function?
Network and Opinion Leaders: Do the central actors and communities that emerged on Instagram reinforce the institutional media, or are they conducive to grassroots connective action?