Comparing the discourses of #BlackLivesMatter and #StopAsianHate on Twitter: Diversity and emotional and moral sentiments

Abstract

AbstractAmid the COVID-19 pandemic, two important antiracist movements, namely, Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate, swept across the United States between 2020 and early 2021. Social media platforms such as Twitter have become an increasingly important tool for mobilizing social movements. To gain a comprehensive understanding of social media users’ attention and reactions to racial injustice during this unprecedented time, the current study explores and compares the discursive characteristics of Twitter discussions of these two movements: their volume changes, word diversities, and moral and emotional sentiments. By analyzing the text of approximately 5 million tweets from April 2020 to April 2021 using a dictionary-based word count method, this research showed that compared to #BlackLivesMatter, #StopAsianHate was less diverse, more morally charged, and less positive in emotional sentiment. Additionally, #StopAsianHate contained stronger moral emotions than #BlackLivesMatter. The study connects these distinct characteristics to the two movements’ differences in their objectives, progress and participants’ demographics and provides implications for effective antiracist activism on social media.

Keywords

• social movement
• social media
• discourse
• racial injustice
• COVID-19