Aenne Knierim
2024
Divergent Discourses: A Comparative Examination of Blackout Tuesday and #BlackLivesMatter on Instagram
Aenne Knierim
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Michael Achmann-Denkler
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Ulrich Heid
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Christian Wolff
Proceedings of the 10th Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2024)
On May 25th, 2020, a viral eleven-minute clip showing the murder of George Floyd sparked international outrage and solidarity, leading to the digital memorial event Blackout Tuesday on Instagram. We analyzed posts to compare Blackout Tuesday discourse with #blacklivesmatter movement conversations. Using topic modeling, we identified dominant themes and counter-narratives in Blackout Tuesday and #blacklivesmatter captions. Using hashtag co-occurrence analysis, we investigatehashtag networks to situate the discourses within spheres of Instagram activism. Our findings indicate that both corpora share themes like “calls to action”, but Blackout Tuesday posts are shorter and solidarity-focused, while #blacklivesmatter posts are longer and address white privilege more explicitly. #blacklivesmatter is linked to anti-racist activism hashtags, while Blackout Tuesday connects more with popular culture and #Alllivesmatter. This supports qualitative research on Blackout Tuesday’s performative allyship, adding a quantitative perspective to the field.