Trev gowdy and black lives matter demands

Along with fielding a survey of public attitudes toward Black Lives Matter, political engagement and activism on social media in general, Pew Research Center also conducted a separate analysis of activity around #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter.

The phrase “Black lives matter” first appeared in a July 2013 Facebook post by activist Alicia Garza, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.

Use of #BlackLivesMatter as a hashtag quickly spread to other social media sites such as Twitter.

Over the ensuing decade, the Black Lives Matter movement has been a consistent and substantial topic of conversation on Twitter.

We collected all publicly available tweets containing the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag going all the way back to 2013 – more than 44 million tweets in total.

We then examined these tweets to understand:

• How the volume of tweets tagged with the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag has changed over time;