How activists used social media to organize during the George Floyd protests
Tags: Activism, USA, BlackLivesMatter, Protest, Social Media

Demonstrators participating in the George Floyd protests in the United States used social media to share operational information throughout the protests, repurposing content from international mass-mobilization movements that have occurred over the past year.

Social media allows a movement in one place to take inspiration from another. For example, the 2019 Sudanese and Algerian uprisings used each other’s imagery interchangeably, in a similar fashion to the Arab Spring in 2011. The George Floyd protests are playing out across transnational online spaces, and, in turn, protesters in the United States are leveraging the experiences of a global user base to mobilize effectively against police brutality. And while significant attention and reporting energy is paid to disinformation and misinformation around protests, social media is also a significant organizational tool for protesters around the world.

In the first week of the protests, organizational information about the protests drove conversation across multiple social media platforms. Numerous high-engagement threads offered advice from citizens around the world who had participated in mass-mobilization and pro-democracy movements elsewhere, including the 2019 protests in Chile, Hong Kong, Lebanon, and Sudan. An infographic breaking down how to dress like a Hong Kong protester, for example, was recycled and repurposed as a guide for demonstrators in the United States.

DIY Protest: information spread on U.S. social media

Like other large demonstration movements that have occurred over the past year, U.S. protesters used social media to share organizational and operational information about the protests in their respective cities. Demonstrators used Twitter hashtags — including #LosAngelesProtest, #DCProtest, #atlantaprotest, and #Minneapolisprotest — and posted real-time footage to facilitate locating each other and to direct crowd movements. They used multiple platforms to evade and call out police brutality. In New York, demonstrators have been using the live traffic app Waze and public safety app Citizen to flag the location of police and monitor the flow of other protesters. Demonstrators in Los Angeles started a nationwide trend, using #BLUEFALL to amplify and create a digital archive of instances of police brutality documented over the course of the protests. #BLUEFALL entered Twitter’s trending topics in the United States on the evening of June 4 and had accumulated over 1 million mentions by 494,000 unique users, according to a query using Meltwater Explore.

Flyer explaining the purpose of #BLUEFALL. (Source: @ElijahDaniel/archivearchive)

Demonstrators also used social media to direct the movements on the street and to share operational logistics to educate civilians about how to protest in a militarized situation. Protesters aligning themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement created “protester information cards” that contained links to instructions, legal aid, resources, and literature. Two protest cards, protestinfo.carrd.co and blacklivesmatter.carrd.co have rapidly spread, as protesters shared them on their social media accounts to help mobilize others. According to a CrowdTangle query, between May 28 and June 4, 2020, nearly 150 million Facebook posts linked to either of the cards. Over the same period these two links were interacted with an aggregate total of nearly 27 billion times on the platform, indicating an expansive and viral spread during the protests.