1 research outputs found
Twitter Corpus of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement And Counter Protests: 2013 to 2020
Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a grassroots movement protesting violence towards
Black individuals and communities with a focus on police brutality. The
movement has gained significant media and political attention following the
killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd and the shooting of
Jacob Blake in 2020. Due to its decentralized nature, the #BlackLivesMatter
social media hashtag has come to both represent the movement and been used as a
call to action. Similar hashtags have appeared to counter the BLM movement,
such as #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter. We introduce a data set of 41.8
million tweets from 10 million users which contain one of the following
keywords: BlackLivesMatter, AllLivesMatter and BlueLivesMatter. This data set
contains all currently available tweets from the beginning of the BLM movement
in 2013 to June 2020. We summarize the data set and show temporal trends in use
of both the BlackLivesMatter keyword and keywords associated with counter
movements. In the past, similarly themed, though much smaller in scope, BLM
data sets have been used for studying discourse in protest and counter protest
movements, predicting retweets, examining the role of social media in protest
movements and exploring narrative agency. This paper open-sources a large-scale
data set to facilitate research in the areas of computational social science,
communications, political science, natural language processing, and machine
learning