Social Media Monitoring Report: Black Lives Matter and Anonymous Hashtags Surge

Yesterday, amidst widespread racially-stoked protests and looting in the US, tweets with the hashtags #BlackLivesMatter and #Anonymous surpassed 5.5 million.

The hashtags surpassed #coronavirus, which appear in 255 thousand tweets.

Top 3 Hashtags on Sunday, May 31, 2020

• #BlackLivesMatter – 4M tweets
• #Anonymous – 1.5M tweets
• #coronavirus – 255K tweets

The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, along with the hashtags #JusticeForAhmaud and #AhmaudAubrey spiked earlier in the month, appearing on 41 thousand tweets.

Amaud Aubrey was killed while jogging in broad daylight. He was unarmed.

His death occurred three days before the anniversary of the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, another unarmed African-American whose murder sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.

The May 2020 peak for #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter was on Thursday, May 28, when it appeared in 5.7 million tweets, just 3 days after George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis officer who restrained him in a knee chokehold that killed him in 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

Three other Minnesota Police Officers, Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao, accomplices to the killing, stood by and watched while Chauvin killed Floyd.

While Chauvin was finally arrested for murder, the other police officers remained free of criminal charges.

Child Rape Charges Against POTUS Go Viral

On the same day, tweets with the hashtag #Anonymous reached 1.5 million, as the hacker collective “leaked a set of documents linking numerous powerful names in the United States of America (USA) to the Jeffrey Epstein case.”

One of those leaked documents is a child rape, sexual assault, and battery charges claim by 12 and 13-year-old plaintiffs against defendants Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

#Anonymous was the second most tweeted hashtag yesterday in America, as shock about the graphic details of the child molestation and battery charges against Donald J. Trump went viral online.

The case was settled out of court in 2016, and the records were sealed.

Despite protests about racism in America that led to the activation of the National Guard in 15 states, #Anonymous was still the second most tweeted hashtag, according to the social media monitoring reports we conducted.

To Change the Future, Confront the Past

After several police shootings sparked public protests and demands for more accountable policing, President Barack Obama 2014 appointed a task force on 21st-century policing to identify best practices and make recommendations on how policing practices can promote effective crime reduction while building public trust.

The task force generated 59 recommendations with 92 action items in its Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which provides clear direction on how to build trust with the public.

The task force also prepared an implementation guide to help communities implement their recommendations.

Equal Justice Initiative executive director Bryan Stevenson was a task force member who is quoted extensively about reforming police culture.

New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the 1619 Project, released a curriculum to help educators teach children the truth about US history and why racism remains among the nation’s biggest challenges.

Both efforts have been largely ignored.

After World War ll, Germany took collective action to “rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of the National Socialist ideology (Nazism).”

America has yet to address it white supremacy roots.

Until it does, expect the societal, political, educational, and economic inequities and injustices that fuel income inequality and racially stoked looting to persist.