Intersecting matters: #GeorgeFloyd and #COVID19

Authors

  • Jenny L. Davis Australian National University
  • Tony P. Love University of Kentucky

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i4.12581

Abstract

In the late spring of 2020 amid a global pandemic, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, triggering mass protests under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement. We take this moment of coinciding crises as our point of analysis observed through the lens of concurrent hashtags on Twitter. Social media content both reflect and construct the social meanings of topics and events. We thus draw from social media to understand how George Floyd and COVID-19 inform and inflect each other, building a dataset from ∼20,000 tweets that unite prevalent hashtags associated with each. Analyses reveal a repeating set of symbolic hooks — death, breath, masks, and voice — encompassing dense and competing narratives about justice and injustice, systemic inequality, degrading trust in institutions, and the changing identity of a nation. These narratives are anchored in the events under study and indexed through co-occurring social media registers. In addition to substantive findings, the study introduces and applies hashtag convergence, a novel methodological approach based on user-generated indexical pairings.

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Published

2022-04-05

How to Cite

Davis, J. L., & Love, T. P. (2022). Intersecting matters: #GeorgeFloyd and #COVID19. First Monday, 27(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i4.12581