Abstract
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the last decade has gained widespread support for protests against police brutality targeting African Americans. However, some people during these protests have resorted to violence, mostly against property, creating an opening for opponents to shift the debate from protesters’ grievances to the nature of the protests by labeling them as “riots” and depicting protesters as criminals. In recent years, activists have turned to social media networks such as Twitter to counter these claims. The following study draws upon Stanley Cohen’s work on official accounts of denial to analyze how activists during the Ferguson unrest of August 2014 responded to attempts to delegitimize their protests. Based on a qualitative analysis of 4201 tweets by three leading activists who participated in these protests, it shows how they used interpretive and implicatory denial as well as positive representations of events to create a counternarrative that allowed them to garner public support as well as focus attention on protesters’ grievances. Through its examination of these discursive strategies, this study offers a theoretical and methodological framework of analysis that can be applied to different struggles and contentious repertoires.
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Notes
The analysis did not include video content that French and Mckesson uploaded via Vine (a total of 479 tweets). Vine users could post up to six-second videos and share them on Twitter and other social media platforms.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Michal Givoni and Lynn Schler for their critique and insights at the early stages of this work. I also greatly appreciate the thoughtful insights of the anonymous reviewers and editors of Society. A special thanks to Ron Dudai for his support, encouragement, and valuable feedback on previous versions of this manuscript.
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Partial financial support was received from The Tamar Golan Africa Centre at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel.
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Wolberg, C. “This Is Not a Riot”: Activists’ Responses to Accusations of Violence in the Ferguson Unrest. Soc 60, 1024–1033 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-023-00925-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-023-00925-x