Divergent Discourses: A Comparative Examination of Blackout Tuesday and #BlackLivesMatter on Instagram
Authors: Knierim Aenne, Michael Achmann, Ulrich Heid, Christian Wolff (Universität Hildesheim, Universität Regensburg, 2024)
Topic: Sentiment, Emotion, Irony, Hate

Abstract
On May 25th, 2020, a viral eleven-minute clip showing the murder of George Floyd sparked international outrage and solidarity, leading to the digital memorial event Blackout Tuesday on Instagram. We analyzed posts to compare Blackout Tuesday discourse with #blacklivesmatter movement conversations. Using topic modeling, we identified dominant themes and counter-narratives in Blackout Tuesday and #blacklivesmatter captions. Using hashtag co-occurrence analysis, we investigate hashtag networks to situate the discourses within spheres of Instagram activism. Our findings indicate that both corpora share themes like ”calls to action”, but Blackout Tuesday posts are shorter and solidarity-focused, while #blacklivesmatter posts are longer and address white privilege more explicitly. #blacklivesmatter is linked to anti-racist activism hashtags, while Blackout Tuesday connects more with popular culture and #Alllivesmatter. This supports qualitative research on Blackout Tuesday’s performative allyship, adding a quantitative perspective to existing research.

Introduction
The number of posts from the #blacklivesmatter move- ment (#blm) is estimated to be 28 million, which exempli- fies the movement’s impact on society [1, 2]. However, the popularity of the movement reached a peak when “Blackout Tuesday” (BT) took place, a digital memorial day on Instagram [1, 2]. BT was caused by a wave of outrage about the murder of George Floyd, an African American who was killed on May 25, 2020 by two white police officers in Minneapolis. The outrage was sparked by an 11-minute clip of the murder which went viral in social media. The video was posted in the context of the #blm movement and in a cultural setting where African Americans perceived law enforcement as agents of bru- tality [3]. To postulate solidarity with African Americans in their fight for racial justice, social media users posted a black square and added a post caption with the hash- tag #blackouttuesday. Given the cultural context, the video supported the perception of white police brutality, white supremacy, and systemic injustice against African Americans. While #blm needed years to gain a large international audience, BT reached millions within a day. The #blm movement has received significant attention in research and has had a strong impact on discussions in mainstream media; however, little attention has been paid to BT to date. Most existing research on BT has been conducted using interview studies and hermeneutic methodologies. In addition, there is one quantitative study by Chang et al. [7] which examines the contents of images, focusing on visual and geographic analyses. Because a large share of the posts related to BT feature a black tile rather than an image, it is also important to examine the text in the post, the caption. To fill this gap, this study used text mining to investi- gate the content of posts on BT. We examined the interre- lations between BT and #blm by applying topic modeling and hashtag co-occurrence analysis to both discourses within the same period of time. Our aim was to under- stand how BT has impacted the #blm discourse. We also wanted to compare the different types of discourse, as BT is a digital memorial day, whereas #blm is a new social movement.

Conclusion
Previous work has investigated visual aspects of BT, stud- ied posting motivations and the the role of celebrities, while we studied Instagram post captions [36, 37, 14]. We contrasted topics and hashtag co-occurences of the digital memorial event BT and the impactful movement #blm. We found that they share many similar topics, such as calls to action, mentions and thoughts of George Floyd, and connections to other antiracist movements. However, BT posts were posted from the solidarity per- spective, while #blm discourse broaches the issue of white privilege. Moreover, #blm is more closely related to other hashtags of Black activism, while BT posts are more fre- quently connected to posts related to popular culture, underscoring its place in mainstream micro-activism. Nevertheless, topic modeling results show that many BT posts seek to mobilize people or express solidarity to- wards the murder or police brutality (see figure 2, figure 1). We gain insight into networks of Black activism on Instagram. #blm is embedded in a network of anti-racist activism. Posts with the hashtag are on average more than twice as long and have a higher type-token ratio. In contrast, BT posts are shorter and contain many dif- ferent hashtags. Posts in various languages characterize the memorial day as an international event. BT is an international spark of outrage – and in its nature more superficial than #blm. We point to Wellman’s study, who investigates BT in the light of performative allyship [37]. Next to this, future work should compare the contents of #alllivesmatter and BT posts.