We discuss how members of the #TrayvonMartin network made sense of the facts of the case and framed the story with counterpublic narratives that highlighted the epidemics of racial stereotypes, fear, and anti-Black violence that resulted in Martin’s death. It was used to spread awareness and empower people to fight for gender equality. And oppositional consciousness represents the mindset of oppressed peoples like people of color who see their identity in opposition to a dominant culture and fight for their authentic representation. This article is excerpted from “#HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice,” which is freely available via open access. Maria Roach created a MoveOn.org petition on March 17 that eventually received 500,000 signatures. This advocacy reflects the diversity of ways in which Twitter became a useful tool in the aftermath of Martin’s killing. Because of their high number of retweets, these two parody accounts occupy unusually central positions in the network, in this way more closely resembling the accounts of journalists and celebrities (such as @andersoncooper, @TherealTaraji) than other parody accounts, which tend to appear along the periphery of the network. We are trying the best to update the database with pupular and trending hashtags with our algorithm. Black Lives Matter has evolved into a movement, one that’s still growing. Hashtags are now used regularly by millions of social media users, especially among members of the largest micro-blogging community Twitter. It is thus clear that while figures like Combs and other celebrities became central to spreading information about the case, they did so at the behest of ordinary people, mostly African American members of an often ignored counterpublic who tweeted at them asking for support and help. The question at the heart of contributor’s images was: What would mass media do if I died at the hands of a cop? Dozens of users tweeted messages directly at Combs asking him to use his platform to draw attention to the case, while others accused Combs of failing in his moral duties as a Black star who vacationed in Florida as the Martin family struggled to gain national attention. Here’s a plan to change that. While less central to the network than these Black women celebrities, the rapper-producer Diddy Combs’s tweet sharing the previously discussed Change.org petition was popular in the network, along with a tweet from Real Time HBO host Bill Maher in which the comedian stated, “No probable cause in #TrayvonMartin murder? This suggests that users became relatively more savvy over time about identifying hoaxes, and consequently hoax accounts were less influential in the discourse during the trial network than they were previously. Since 2009, the #OscarGrant hashtag has been used in conjunction with other hashtags that mark the names of Black people subject to extrajudicial killings. She found that 98% of the images contributed were black—half men, half women. Hashtags are especially useful for advocacy projects. TWiB! Critical Race Theory posits that racism is daily and embedded in American society. produces seven different podcasts on a range of topics, and they get over a million downloads a month of their main program. The Black celebrities central to this network, the majority of whom were Black women, expressed grief and outrage over Trayvon Martin’s death and combined advocacy efforts for justice in the case with personalized commentary that constructed Martin as an “every kid.” For example, actress Taraji P. Henson tweeted, “I worry about my son!!!! As Genie Lauren’s account shared in the foreword [to “#HashtagActivism“] attests, when she learned that a juror on the Zimmerman case had procured a literary agent to write a tell-all about her experience, Lauren took to Twitter to encourage others to demand the rescinding of the contract. All of this is moving toward a Digital Black Feminism and reframing activism. A second hashtag, #BlackOutDay, has also become inundated with images of black squares. In coordination with the march, ordinary people and celebrities across the country showed their solidarity with Martin’s family by posting selfies donning hoodies, commenting on the banal nature of the clothing that was being discussed in the media by conservative pundits like Geraldo Rivera as “thug wear.” The march spurred more celebrity support from rappers Nelly and Sean “Diddy” Combs. Cooper’s most influential tweet in the pretrial network read, “What I question is why #TrayvonMartin’s shooter instantly called him ‘suspicious’ and said ‘these a..holes, they always get away.’ @AC360 8p.” Here Cooper reveals his own suspicion of racial bias, though he avoids naming it explicitly. @AC360 8p, 10p.” Notably, the latter tweet received only about one-tenth the response of Cooper’s first-person, “What I question …” tweet, reflecting the prioritizing in the network of news narratives that legitimized Martin’s victimhood and connected it directly to racism. For example, similar to the @RealFerrellWill and @WeLoveTrayvon accounts described above, a parody account masquerading as that of actor Will Smith (@realWillSmith) received more than five hundred retweets in exchange for promised financial donations to the (fictional) #TrayvonMartin Foundation. Steele studied the blogging community For Harriet, which functions as a kind of “digital barbershop,” an enclave that represents a particular context of culture necessary to gain entry. However, unlike the similar accounts in the pretrial network, the @realWillSmith donation-for-retweet promise was extremely short-lived, lasting only hours, compared to several days for the accounts that trended in the pretrial network. This precharges time period was characterized by intense and targeted efforts on behalf of the Martin family lawyers and others to publicize Martin’s story, including the Change.org petition described above, tweets about Martin by several highly followed celebrities and journalists, and significant press coverage of the incident in the mainstream media. And they abetted white fragility in depictions that would comforting whites and reduce their stress about racism. In a summary of trends, Twitter said the hashtag #COVID19 and other variations were tweeted nearly 400 million times, while #StayHome was the third biggest hashtag of the year. This panel features four anti-racist, feminist scholars, showcasing how we as researchers take on the role of documenting and amplifying the work that activists are doing already online. Now it's #trayvonmartin! Further, this linkage is used to make the point that little has changed in the treatment of Black bodies in U.S. society despite the supposed racial advances of post–civil rights America. The black square seemed to sum up the empty posturing of a culture that praises the performance of activism more than it does the actual practice of it. In the question and answer after the panel, one participant articulated this as a tactic of witnessing the has long been a part of black culture and activism. Activism is not just rooted in game development. This is clearly a systemic issue. #TrayvonMartin, Guy: #TrayvonMartin died after experiencing child's worst fear: "to be followed on the way home in the dark by a stranger." Let’s keep it that way. TWiB! @AC360 8p, 10p,” and a tweet sent one week later that focused on Zimmerman’s version of the story: “Just interviewed #trayvonmartin’s shooter’s attorney. Using hashtags on Instagram and elsewhere helps users tag content of a particular subject with the # symbol to organize and categorize messages or photos. This includes game companies themselves as well as gamers and game developers. Organizers used Twitter, a fledgling platform at the time, to inform community members when and where to meet for the first protest of Grant’s death on January 7, 2009. The precharges network includes data from March 10, 2012, a little more than three weeks after Trayvon Martin’s death, through April 10, 2012, the day before George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder for the shooting. Twitter was deployed again in the aftermath of Mehserle’s trial, this time to help demonstrators avoid run-ins with police. Beyond Hashtags tells the story of an influential subsection of these networks, an assemblage of podcasting, independent media, Instagram, Vine, Facebook, and the network of Twitter users that has come to be known as “Black Twitter.” Florini looks at how black Americans use these technologies often simultaneously to create a space to reassert their racial identities, forge community, organize … In this case hashtags has been used to access vital information and news update on the topic. In May and June, the hashtag was tweeted an average of 3.7 million times a day. There is a shift away from elite notions of knowledge. Simpson, Black Femininity and Sexuality: black women cannot show off their bodies in anyway because it is perceived as slutty. And in the middle of Black Lives Matter, Beyonce released her own album online and called herself a feminist. Notably, this set of Black celebrity influencers is markedly younger than those that appeared in the pretrial network. On the day after the acquittal, for example, Rihanna’s short tweet “Only in America! It was used to spread awareness and empower people to fight for gender equality. The Zimmerman camp’s use of PayPal and later Twitter, and the “trayvoning” meme, illustrate some of the ways hashtags and social media can be used to defend or dismiss injustices even as counterpublics work to resolve them. And building on the popular #Planking and #Tebowing memes, the hashtag #Trayvoning was used by mostly white youth to post pictures of themselves posed as if dead with Skittles and AriZona Iced Tea in their hands. This suggests @RealFarrellWill and @WeLoveTrayvon, despite their disingenuous promises of charitable donations and their eventual suspension and deletion from the platform, may have played an outsized role in popularizing the #TrayvonMartin hashtag and, perhaps, awareness of Martin’s death more generally. The effort was unique mobilization of black gamers, but also received backlash from others arguing that Twitch was not a place to do this activism. Can’t figure it out? Between March 10, 2012, and February 15, 2015 (our data collection window), the hashtag #TrayvonMartin appeared in more than three million tweets generated by nearly two million unique users. And the images contribute to the depiction of a broad spectrum of the elements of black lives mattering, and we should be seeing them as a whole, not just good and bad. These included a tweet in which the anchor rephrased his initial reaction as a rhetorical question that did more discursive avoidance of blame attribution: “The shooting of #TrayvonMartin. And the posts were 100% visual, including an image or images, 65% with text and 35% with only an image. These tweets were sent during the year-plus that elapsed from the day George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder (April 11, 2012) through the day he was acquitted of all charges related to Trayvon Martin’s death (July 13, 2013). 848.9k Followers, 822 Following, 4,740 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from EBC (@embracingblackculture) The meme does not delegitimize Martin’s victimhood directly, noting that he was unarmed and seventeen, but suggests that a white teen named Marley Lion met a similar fate and unfairly received no outcry or attention. Using what political sociologist Paolo Gerbaudo calls the “choreography of assembly,” which combines traditional on-the-ground activism with technology-based coordination, Oakland residents tweeted the positions of police blockades and helped those on the ground navigate the city streets. This is in direct contrast with traditional black feminist bell hooks, who pushed back against the notion that Beyonce as feminist as diminishing the definition of feminism. He says race was not a factor in George Zimmerman killing Martin. She feels the whole community has a responsibility to respond to issues of racism and develop solutions to these problems. Bloggers are speaking and owning these contradictions between self and community. Zimmerman’s acquittal the following year sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. 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