How the BLM Protests Shook US Internet Infrastructure
Thousands marched the streets of the United States through May and June 2020. But did the internet notice?
Hundreds of thousands of people globally have marched in protests against police brutality and systemic racism, spurred by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on the 25th of May. In the USA, over 450 protests have flared up across every state since the first demonstration in Minneapolis on the 26th of May.
The Black Lives Matter movement has since taken social media by storm, enabling the rapid sharing and accessing of information via these platforms. One social media trend, the controversial #BlackoutTuesday, saw over 23.3 million posts featuring plain black squares on the 2nd of June. Initially organised by the entertainment industry as a gesture of solidarity, this trend was widely criticized for clogging up social media and preventing the spread of useful information about the protests and the movement more widely.
Coordinated gatherings of the scale seen in the United States have the potential to locally warp internet speeds as masses of people create, post and upload content about activities happening on the ground. The demand for bandwidth can lead to a surge in signal latency, which serves as a proxy measure for local internet pressure.
At the Monash IP Observatory, our technology has previously provided internet regulators in the United States with comfort around the stability of US internet infrastructure under rolling COVID-19 lock-downs.
But it turns out that the Black Lives Matter movement sent ripples through the internet in ways that COVID-19 hadn’t (so far).
Here we document what we saw.
Southern California
Across several Southern CA cities, we observed large spikes in internet pressure, i.e. slower immediacy of internet speeds, on the 31st of May and 2nd of June. Los Angeles, San Diego, Bakersfield and Oxnard were the biggest hit on these dates.
The 31st of May marked the end of the first weekend of nationwide protests, as well as the implementation of curfews in many larger cities in response to looting and rioting.
Interestingly, the spike on Tuesday the 2nd of June occurred around the same time as Blackout Tuesday, a.k.a. #TheShowMustBePaused. With a huge, temporary increase in online activity on this day, increases in internet pressure are not unexpected, especially in entertainment industry hot-spots like LA.
These spikes could reflect changes in internet usage on the ground, infrastructural limitations in the region, or a combination of both.
With a rise in protest coordination on the 30th of May, the first Saturday since Floyd’s death, it is possible that there was added pressure on the demand for bandwidth as people shared and organised these events.
Los Angeles
LA is the largest city in CA, with a population of over 4 million people. Protests in LA began on the 27th of May, 2 days after Floyd’s death. After protest crowds started to become violent on the afternoon of Saturday the 30th, a curfew was introduced to cover the following week of demonstrations.
San Diego
San Diego sits about 190km south of LA, next to the Mexican border. In San Diego, protests began on the 29th of May. While most protests in San Diego were peaceful, some turned violent, with over 100 arrests made on Sunday May 31st, spurring curfews starting from 8pm that night.
Bakersfield
Bakersfield is a Southern Californian city sitting North of LA, with a population of ~380,000.
Oxnard
Oxnard is West of LA and South of Bakersfield, with a population of ~200,000.
Other cities of interest
Tampa Bay area, Florida
The Tampa Bay area is a coastal metropolitan region in Western Florida which includes the city of Tampa, St Petersburg and Clearwater and has a population of ~2.7 million.
Many protests in the Tampa Bay area remained peaceful over the first weekend (30–31st of May), but crowds became violent at nighttime, with several arrests reported in Tampa.
Protest crowds remained strong throughout the first week, with police beginning to take more aggressive measures to contain rioting crowds from the evening of Tuesday the 2nd of June.
There was a large spike in internet pressure in the Tampa region between the 31st of May and the 5th of June.
Denton, Texas
Denton is a small city in Texas, around 60km North-West of central Dallas.
Protests around Denton county courthouse square drew thousands over the weekend of the 30th of May and continued well into the following days and weeks.
With an evening curfew introduced from the 31st May, police were asking for voluntary compliance with crowds that were largely peaceful.
There was a period of high internet pressure from the 31st of May to the 5th of June with similar characteristics to the spike observed in Florida.
Anchorage, Alaska
Peaceful protests in Alaska’s largest city began on May 30th and have continued for several weeks. Internet pressure was sustained at a higher level between the 31st of May and 5th of June.
Springfield, MA
Demonstrations in Springfield have continued since the weekend of the 30th of May, with protesters gathering in large numbers outside police headquarters on June 3rd (Pictured). Around this date we also see a rise in local internet pressure.
Minneapolis
Minneapolis, the epicentre of nationwide #BLM protests, has remained relatively stable in regards to internet pressure over this turbulent time period.
Washington, DC
Tens of thousands of DC residents have turned out to protest the death of George Floyd over the past month, with the plaza running in front of the White house being officially renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza”. Despite this, the local internet infrastructure has had no problem handling the added demand.
Our Methodology
To generate the data behind these observations, we combine a commercially available geo-located IP database with our powerful scanning technology which measures the online or offline status of millions of Internet addresses globally every hour.
Our observational methodology uses the most basic Internet messaging protocol that is widely used billions of times a day to establish routes for your email, tweet, or share. After developing a carefully selected set of Internet addresses (IPs) to measure, we periodically send them one of these tiny messages, essentially asking, ‘Are on you online?’. These online/offline answers form the basis for our ‘connectivity’ indicators.
In addition, we also receive back from these measurements the responsiveness, or latency, of the IP (measured in round-trip-time, or rtt). Latency is a reasonable proxy for the experienced speed of connection, especially for any user who is interacting with a major social platform where even basic chat activities to other users nearby must travel to a server well beyond national borders (and back again).
Importantly, the IP Observatory has no access to any content being shared, viewed, visited, or generated by a user at a given IP, and all IP Observatory activity works in aggregates of thousands of randomly sampled measurements across geo-spatial sub-regions.
Acknowledgement: Hayley Lock assisted with background research and analysis in the preparation of this article.
The mission of the Monash University IP Observatory — ‘internet insights for social good’ — is to monitor the availability and quality of the Internet during critical events such as elections, natural disasters or conflicts. The IP-Observatory is fully compliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (EU-GDPR). The IP-Observatory does not collect, hold or process personal data. The IP Observatory was founded by Klaus Ackermann, lecturer in Econometrics and Business Statistics, and Simon Angus, and Paul Raschky, Associate Professors in Economics. The observatory is a project of SoDa Laboratories at the Monash Business School, and tweets @IP_Observatory.
