Demonstrators take part in a protest in Foley Square on Dec. 4 in New York City after yesterday's decision by a Staten Island grand jury not to indict a police officer who used a chokehold in the death of Eric Garner in July. (Kena Betancur/Getty Images)
Twitter has released a map showing the spread over the past week and a half of hashtags related to the deaths of two African American men at the hands of police officers, one in Ferguson, Mo., and the other in Staten Island, N.Y. With the caveat that in some ways the visualization is simply a density map of the Twitter-using population, it offers insight into how complementary hashtags are used to rally around specific but related events.
The visualization starts Nov. 24, the day on which a Missouri prosecutor will later announce the results of a grand jury decision on whether to indict then-officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown. The announcement came at night, but the daylight hours lit up with the spread of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. After late word came that the grand jury had chosen not to pursue charges against Wilson, that hashtag explodes. It returns to a simmer in the days that followed.
Curiously, it isn't until Dec. 1 that #HandsUpDontShoot — a reference to the idea that Brown could have had his arms raised during at least part of the shooting — picks up considerable steam.
(Twitter previously published a map showing references to Ferguson in the wake of Brown's Aug. 9 death.)
And then on Dec. 3, 2014, a grand jury in Staten Island chose not to indict Daniel Pantaleo, a police officer, in the death of Eric Garner. The map explodes with tweets tagged #ICantBreathe, a nod to what Garner repeatedly told police officers after he was wrestled to the ground. Soon after, #BlackLivesMatter reignites and spreads across the globe.
Hashtags, the map shows, are persistent, flexible things. #BlackLivesMatter is serving as sort of a catch-all for the bigger idea at work that users are going back to again and again, with more tailored tags emerging as a way of tying each incident into that broader, ongoing, powerful conversation.
