Black Lives Matter: Hope Through Data
The ways in which social media has caused change
By now, the whole world knows about George Floyd, the African American who was killed by a white police officer who refused to move his knee from his neck as Floyd pleaded to let him go. By now, the whole world knows that peaceful protests and violent riots have cropped up across the United States from people who are tired of seeing Black Americans suffer from police brutality again, and again, and again. By now, you might be wondering how this is any different from previous times. Will anything change?
I’m not an expert on BLM, nor am I a data scientist. But, just looking at the influx of social media posts I’ve seen from friends about the racial injustices in the United States, to the many #blackouttuesday posts from people who’ve never talked about this subject before, I wondered what made this case different than from what I’ve seen in my lifetime. And so, I’d like to explore why today is different through Twitter and search trends, as of June 8, 2020.
What I’ve found: more people were outraged on the sixth day since George Floyd’s death on Twitter than any other day. More people are searching for information and ways to donate to BLM than any other search for donations or any other BLM incident. There’s hope for change.
Sentiments
This section explores sentiment analysis from Twitter of English tweets using an application called Hedonometer as a proxy to show world happiness levels. It is “based on people’s online expressions, capitalizing on data-rich social media, and we’re measuring how people present themselves to the outside world.” For example, people seem to be the most happy on Christmas every year, while the start of quarantine from COVID-19 starting on March 12 was the lowest people have felt in Twitter’s history (that is, until George Floyd’s death). While Twitter is used across all countries worldwide, it does have a significant bias towards users living in the US, and that is reflected in the data.
Each graph below shows sentiment data across a date range, and each point represents the average happiness level (colored point) and number of tweets (gray area graph) each day. Below the gray area graph is the average happiness level for every single day since 2009. Each colored point represents a different day of the week. You can read more about their process on Hedonometer’s website.
Above is a graph showing the last year of happiness. You’ll notice that major events are highlighted to explain some of the trends, such as Christmas Day and COVID-19 mentioned previously. In general, the happiness levels are relatively flat, and occasionally will sharply increase or sharply decrease as a result of a major celebration or incident, but will go back to the way things were within a couple of days. That’s what happened with the “Mass shootings at Walmart store in El Paso Texas” on August 3, 2019 and on Christmas Day December 25, 2019. We can also see how changes in happiness levels correlate with changes in number of tweets.
The events from the past year are very different compared to previous years. For one, we see happiness drop to the lowest number as a result of COVID-19 and not completely recover even after two months, but that makes sense as it is an ongoing incident. The murder of George Floyd, however, truly shook up Twitter and portrayed differences in behavior compared to any other incident:
- Sunday May 31, 2020 was the saddest day ever on Twitter (5.63). Contrast this with the previous low, COVID-19 (5.71).
- June 1, 2020 showed both the most number of tweets per day in the English language (400M) as well as the largest increase of tweets in a short time period (2 days prior, that average was 200M per day). Contrast this with the previous major spike in tweets on November 9, 2016 as a result of Donald Trump’s election from 100M per day to 200M in a single day.
- This is the longest number of days average happiness has decreased (6 days) after a single negative incident. Contrast this with the drop from International Women’s Day (March 8, 2020) to COVID-19, which occurred over 4 days.
- This is the longest number of days after a single negative incident (7+ days, ongoing) to recover average happiness to “normal” levels”. Contrast this with two incidents occurring one after the other on August 12, 2017, which in total took 8 days to recover to the previous average.
Now let’s look briefly into specific cases on police brutality that are defined as major events on Hedonometer in chronological order. Below, I’ve modified each incident into a single graph and removed the colored dots to see the trend a bit clearer.
Not guilty verdict (Trayvon Martin): https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/?from=2013-05-31&to=2013-09-23, Protests in Ferguson (Michael Brown): https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/?from=2014-06-09&to=2014-10-02, Baltimore riots (Freddie Gray): https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/?from=2014-09-09&to=2015-01-03, Samuel Dubose: https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/?from=2015-04-02&to=2015-10-17, Alton Sterling: https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/?from=2016-05-23&to=2016-10-09, Keith Lamont Scott: https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/?from=2016-05-17&to=2016-11-19, Ahmaud Arbery & George Floyd: https://hedonometer.org/timeseries/en_all/?from=2019-05-17&to=2020-06-07
Taking a cursory glance at these graphs, we can already see the huge difference in the response on Twitter to George Floyd’s murder compared with the deaths of the other seven portrayed here. George Floyd’s response was the only one with a deep sustained decline in happiness followed by an incline that does not return to “normal”. For everyone else, we can see the drop in happiness levels for a day and then levels go back to “normal” the very next day. For Alton Sterling in graph #5, which led to a mass shooting of Dallas Police Officers, we see instead a 2 day decrease before going back to “normal”.
George Floyd’s murder generated more attention than Ahmaud Arbery, who also was killed during quarantine. The response to Floyd’s death was reflected on Twitter for 13+ days, a full 10+ days more than Alton Sterling’s previous 3 day record, and it is ongoing. His murder generated more outrage and social media presence than Eric Garner, who died in the exact same way, from a chokehold caught on video, and yet his death wasn’t even labeled as a major incident on Hedonometer.
It’s clear that Twitter considers George Floyd’s case to be different than any other, but we would have to dig in even deeper to discover the root cause. Here are some potential factors on why this might be the case.
- Siding against Donald Trump. Donald Trump has no filter when it comes to saying how he feels on Twitter, and has made his views very clear that he doesn’t believe police brutality exists or that racism exists, and openly encourages violence. His election “sparked (people’s) personal political awakenings…and (they) became more active in their communities and online. So by the time this current moment arrived, they were more plugged in,” (Code Switch) more ready to take to social media and to the streets to tell everyone why this is important.
- Quarantine and collective anger. The fact that the whole world is in a global pandemic and people are more plugged into social media than ever is definitely a factor. And because more non-black communities “have become more outspoken this time around” on social media, that leads to more people within those communities to “think that (it feels) safer and more important to care”, and makes it feel “conspicuous to NOT be sharing a post, linking to places to donate, etc”. (Code Switch)
- Ahmaud Arbery’s death coverage during quarantine. The case of Ahmaud Arbery was announced only a couple of weeks before George Floyd, a time where people were already protesting and spreading the news during quarantine. However, his news were neither as widespread nor had the same impact as Floyd’s.
The case of George Floyd is unprecedented. People are outraged and tired. People want change.
Search Trends
The following section uses Google Trends to explore what people are typing into Google as a proxy for interest. Note that each graph looks only at a search query’s popularity within the specified date and location, and unfortunately does not display the scale and specific number of searches. Each graph is scaled around the highest data point, which means that the highest point is scored 100 and the rest are scored based on its volume to that point. It also counts people uniquely, so one search is from one person, even if they did multiple searches.
The Black Lives Matter movement was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. And yet, as we see from the above graph, people were not looking it up until December 2014, and it isn’t until very recently that we see an explosive growth of search queries for the movement. We’ll take a look at the scale a bit later.
Now, let’s explore trends with the five most popular search results who were victims of police brutality: Alton Sterling (blue), Philando Castile (red), Ahmaud Arbery (yellow), Trayvon Martin (Green), and George Floyd (purple).
We can see that searches for George Floyd surpass previous search results by more than 400%. People more than ever are searching for these names.
While Google Trends doesn’t provide specific numbers, we can do some calculations to provide a sense of scale on the above by comparing this with other popular searches. According to Ahrefs, the top Google search result in 2020 as of April 12 is “facebook” with a search volume of 151.5 million per month. Two other search terms are “weather” of 43.4 million and “news” at 19.11 million. We can use that as a proxy. Below, “facebook” is blue, “weather” is green, “news” is purple, “george floyd” is yellow, and “black lives matter” is red.
In this spreadsheet, I did some calculations on the estimated number of searches per day. I exported the above graph, added up all the normalized data from “facebook, “weather”, and “news” before April 12, multiplied each number by 4.4 (number of months since April 12), divided the estimated number of searches by the normalized total, then averaged the three values.
The numbers said this:
- On a “normal” day before May 25, people searched for “black lives matter” 33,772 times a day. On a “peak” day like July 8, 2016, that number is 89,416 times per day. Today, the average searches on the subject per day from May 25-June 8 is 312,956 times. That’s an increase of 827% normally, and an increase of 250% since the term last peaked in 2016.
- “George Floyd” was searched a total of 20,972,527 times from May 25 — June 8. That’s almost half the number of searches for “facebook” (44 million) in the same time period, and is more than if the whole population of Romania or everyone from the top 6 US cities by population searched the query once.
- Searches for “news” spiked following George Floyd’s death for three full days. Note that it appears the spike of news searches in March was due to COVID-19.
Here is the data for the past 16 years for the search query “donate” in the United States.
Again, people overwhelmingly are searching for ways to donate now more than ever before. For context, here are reasons for past spikes:
- September 2005 — Hurricane Katrina, one of the most devastating hurricanes to hit the United States (category 5), killing 1,833 people and leaving millions homeless
- January 2010 — earthquake in Haiti of a 7.0 magnitude that killed hundreds of thousands
- August 2014 — “ice bucket challenge” fundraiser for ALS, standing for “Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis”, a disease that impacts voluntary muscle control, which accounts for swallowing, speaking, walking, and thinking. According to USA Today, the challenge raised over $115 million for the ALS Association
- September 2017 — Hurricane Harvey, a category 4 hurricane that damaged as much property as Katrina
- June 2020 — Black Lives Matter and protests in response to George Floyd’s murder and represents years of police brutality
Just to check, how do we know that the spike accounts for the Black Lives Matter movement and not something else like COVID-19?
The above graph shows the search scores from March 2 to June 8 in the United States representing “donate black lives matter” (blue), “donate covid” (red), “donate masks” (yellow), and “donate coronavirus” (green), which were breakout terms related to the “donate” search term during that time. We can clearly see that people are searching for ways to donate in numbers we’ve never seen before, even more so than to provide help during the pandemic. The number of searches to donate peaked on June 2, which was Black Out Tuesday. This day was also two days after the saddest day on Twitter and likely was the day with the most number of tweets in Twitter’s history.
The spike in donations is also reflected in a recent New York Times article, the movement amassed more than $143 million to various organizations such as bail funds, the Minnesota Freedom Fund, and memorial funds for Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. For the Minnesota Freedom Fund, its “$30 million total haul is nearly 300 times what it raised in its previous full year’s tax filing.”
People are searching to donate on unprecedented levels: more than for COVID, more than previous natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, more than ALS. People are changing.
Just a little bit later
I hope this showed some evidence that this time, it’s different. People are no longer ignoring what’s going on, and more people are donating to support the movement.
To recap, here’s some reasons why George Floyd is different:
- On Twitter, we see the most number of tweets per day, the lowest happiness score, and the longest period of continued low scores relating to the protests and mistreatment of George Floyd
- More people are searching for ways to donate to BLM than any other previous catastrophe
- More people are searching for BLM and George Floyd by 250%+ compared to previous incidents
Here are some reasons why people responded to George Floyd’s death with more vigor than the past that we should explore sometime in the future:
- Increased use of internet and social media during quarantine
- Non-black communities have been primed to be more outspoken as a result of Donald Trump’s election, leading to a collective anger
- Public knowledge of Ahmaud Arbery’s death just a couple weeks before George Floyd’s death
- Differences in video between George Floyd and other viral videos such as Ahmaud Arbery’s, Alton Sterling’s, and Eric Garner’s
Finally, there is proof that change is happening this time with some breaking news from the New York Times in response to the continued protests and social media influence of George Floyd’s murder, within a mere two weeks after:
- Virginia’s governor planned to remove the Confederate general Robert E Lee monument, which has been a source of hot debate for many, many years. Other controversial monuments across the country are doing the same.
- The Minneapolis City Council took action to ban chokeholds (so did New York), required police officers to intervene against the use of excessive force by other officers, and pledged to dismantle the Minnesota police department.
- A NYPD officer was arrested for throwing a protester to the ground.
- A variety of leaders have resigned from executive positions as a result of their response to the protests and/or their record on racial equity, such as Bon Appetit, Crossfit, the Poetry Foundation, and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
- IBM discontinued its development of facial recognition software, which frequently made mistakes towards people of color.
Continue educating yourself. Continue to spread the word, donate, and sign petitions: your search for information and expressing outrage publicly is making a difference. Change is coming. Change is already here.
Some Black Lives Matter Resources
- Start here: BLM carrd, which has places to donate, resources to learn more (such as Justice in June, a schedule to learn every day in June), information about protests, petitions to sign, and more
Here is a list of organizations that are still accepting donations:
- Black Trans Travel Fund
- My Block, My Hood, My City
- Marsha P Johnson Institute
- Black Women’s Blueprint
- The Loveland Foundation
- Color of Change
- Know Your Rights Camp
- Emergency Release Fund
- Brennan Center at NYU
- COVID Bail Out NYC
- Innocence Project
- The Bail Project
- ACLU
More information about the deaths mentioned here as a starting point:
- Trayvon Martin
- Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri
- Freddie Gray
- Samuel Dubose
- Alton Sterling
- Eric Garner
- Ahmaud Arbery
Other resources to read on allyship from a colleague:
- Allyship at All Levels: How Organizations Can Support Black Employees Right Now (WEBINAR)
- How to Discuss Race at Work (WEBINAR)
- Black People Need Stronger White Allies
- How To Be An Ally During Times of Tragedy
- Anti-Racism Resources for White People
- 11 Things You Can Do To Help Black Lives Matter End Police Violence
- Article on general allyship with a corresponding YouTube video
- List of ways white people can take action in response to state-sanctioned violence
- Resources for White People to Learn and Talk About Race and Racism
- Save the Tears: White Woman’s Guide
- How to manage your team in times of political trauma
- Your Black Colleagues May Look Like They’re Okay — Chances Are They’re Not
