Social Media and the Broadening of Social Movements: Evidence from Black Lives Matter
97 Pages Posted: 23 Apr 2021 Last revised: 13 Dec 2022
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Social Media and the Broadening of Social Movements: Evidence from Black Lives Matter
Social Media and the Broadening of Social Movements: Evidence from Black Lives Matter
Date Written: December 2022
Abstract
How do modern social movements broaden their base? In this paper, we provide evidence that the broadening of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the spring of 2020 was driven by an increase in the use of social media. We leverage Super Spreader Events in the early stages of the pandemic to show that pandemic exposure (COVID-19 related deaths) is causally linked to online and offline BLM protest in counties that never experienced a BLM related protest before. We show that the preceding, pandemic-induced uptake in social media can account for this broadening, using a novel index of social media penetration based on 45 million tweets, Google searches and mobility data. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in pandemic exposure led to a 27% increase in new Twitter accounts and an increase in protest propensity of 9 percentage points. Our results suggest that the pandemic acted as a demand shock to social media and subsequently activated protesters in new segments of society to join the movement for the first time.
Keywords: social media, Twitter, BLM, protest, COVID-19
JEL Classification: P16, D7
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation