By Sarah E. Needleman and Sebastian Herrera
Social media has become a central battleground for the protests
across the U.S., with tech platforms amplifying tensions while also
providing a real-time chronicle of the riots and police responses
that might not have otherwise gained widespread attention.
A lone video of the violent arrest that led to the death of
George Floyd posted last Monday on Facebook by a bystander,
Darnella Frazier, has been shared by 52,000 people there and found
its way to Twitter, Instagram and other social platforms, widening
awareness of the episode. Since then those outlets have been a tool
to spread dissent and anger by those upset at Mr. Floyd's death and
those disturbed by the sometimes violent actions of both protesters
and police in cities across the country.
Social media played a critical role in galvanizing the
protesters through the quickly shared video around Mr. Floyd's
arrest, said Alex Stamos, director of Stanford University's
Internet Observatory. "It nationalizes local issues like this," he
said, adding that "maybe 20 years ago this might have only been
covered at the local press."
Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford law professor and co-director of
the California university's Cyber Policy Center, said the riots
also have turned into an online battle of opposing viewpoints.
"There is a fight on social media as to how to portray the events
on the ground," he said.
The platforms not only can fuel the emotions underlying the
protests, they can also shape on-the-ground tactics on both sides.
Some of the protesters and their supporters appear to be using
social media to avoid clashing with law enforcement, said Lorenzo
Boyd, assistant provost for diversity and inclusion and director of
the Center for Advanced Policing at the University of New Haven.
These protesters are telling one another what areas to avoid and
which ones are safe -- and faster than police in many cases can
react, he said.
"Protesting in the time of social media is instantaneous," said
Dr. Boyd. "You don't need a single leader to do this anymore."
People on Twitter said they were issuing alerts to protesters
about police movements by using scanners to listen in to official
communications. One user allegedly relaying L.A. police department
activity warned that police were trying to lure protesters toward a
certain area to conduct arrests, and urged followers to share the
tweet. It was retweeted over 120,000 times and liked more than
240,000 times.
The strategy has been used by law enforcement as well. The New
York Police Department on Sunday said it was monitoring social
media to track protesters.
Moments of upheaval have long defined social media. Twitter,
then only five years old, became a central tool for protesters
during the Arab Spring unrest in 2011. The #blacklivesmatter
hashtag on Twitter began in connection with the 2012 shooting death
of unarmed Florida teen Trayvon Martin and soon spread. Last year,
footage of attacks on a pair of mosques that left 50 dead in New
Zealand was streamed live on Facebook and posted on YouTube and
Twitter. The social-media platforms scrambled to remove them.
The coronavirus pandemic has added to social media's reach.
Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. both have seen big growth in user
numbers during the health crisis as people looked for information
on the disease and for ways to remain connected.
Discussion related to the George Floyd video and the ensuing
protests now have overtaken the coronavirus as the hottest topic
online, said Gideon Blocq, chief executive officer of VineSight, a
startup that tracks social-media activity and hunts for
misinformation.
Mr. Blocq warned that bad actors have infiltrated online
discussion over Mr. Floyd's death to heighten division. Many
accounts tweeting content appear to be automated accounts known as
bots, he said. Conspiracies that point to different political
figures being behind the protests abound online, Mr. Blocq
said.
Past moments of racial tensions have been used by foreign actors
to try to foment divisions in the U.S. Workers behind
Russian-linked Facebook accounts in 2016 sought to exploit social
divisions after outrage swelled over fatal shootings in Dallas and
Minneapolis. Facebook said it closed such accounts.
A Twitter spokeswoman said the company was using existing teams
and tools to police riot-related content on its site and was taking
action on any coordinated attempts to disrupt the conversation
around the issue. Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook's head of
cybersecurity policy, said the company is using tools to combat
misinformation around the protests while trying to avoid hindering
people's ability to share information.
What helped trigger the outrage over Mr. Floyd's death were
several race-related events that were widely publicized before the
video of his arrest, said Joan Donovan, director of a Harvard
University project on technology and social change.
Days earlier, Americans were wrestling with the shooting death
of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man who was pursued by armed
white residents in Georgia. A video of the incident spread across
social media. That video was followed by one of a white woman in
New York's Central Park calling the police on a black man who had
asked her to leash her dog.
"It takes a special kind of moment for something like this to
kick off," Dr. Donovan said.
As the reach of the social-media companies has grown, they have
faced increasing pressure to moderate some of their content. That
debate that is taking place within the companies and has become a
political flashpoint for the nation.
Twitter last week flagged one of President Trump's tweets about
the unrest in Minneapolis, where Mr. Floyd died, saying it
glorified violence. That action kept Mr. Trump's tweet in place,
but prevented his more than 80 million followers from commenting,
retweeting or liking it.
The same post remained on Facebook untouched. Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg said he had a "visceral negative reaction to this kind
of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric," but wouldn't remove the
post because Facebook wants to enable as much expression as
possible.
Mr. Trump and his backers have attacked Twitter for its moves,
which earlier included placing a fact-check notice on two of the
president's tweets about voting by mail, saying the tweet violated
its rules around voter misinformation. After Twitter applied its
fact-check labels, Mr. Trump signed an executive order Thursday
seeking to limit the broad legal protection that federal law
currently provides to social-media and other online platforms. The
move is expected to draw immediate court challenges.
VineSight's Mr. Blocq said that as discussions around the
protests have grown especially on Twitter, it has given rise to
competing narratives about who is behind them and the lootings in
several cities. The split, he said, has been between those who are
placing blame on the far-left groups known as Antifa and those
saying far-right groups and white supremacists have been the
cause.
Mr. Trump on Sunday said the protests involved radical left
anarchists and Antifa, which he said would be designated a
terrorist organization. Minnesota officials Saturday said that
white supremacists and perhaps organized drug cartels could be
infiltrating protests.
Those competing viewpoints can often help intensify conflict,
said Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at the University of
California, Berkeley. "People are going into their same camps to
tell their side of the story," he said. "That's the hard part about
consuming news over social media."
Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com and
Sebastian Herrera at Sebastian.Herrera@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 01, 2020 09:52 ET (13:52 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.