Words and Action: Modeling Linguistic Leadership in #BlackLivesMatter Communities
This addresses the problem of understanding linguistic influence in social movements for researchers and policymakers, though it appears incremental as it adapts existing methods to new data.
The researchers tackled the problem of modeling semantic leadership in #BlackLivesMatter communities by developing bespoke methods for time-binning, community clustering, and semantic change detection, finding substantial evidence of leadership roles for BLM activists, progressives, and Black celebrities, as well as sustained conservative engagement.
In this project, we describe a method of modeling semantic leadership across a set of communities associated with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has been informed by qualitative research on the structure of social media and Black Twitter in particular. We describe our bespoke approaches to time-binning, community clustering, and connecting communities over time, as well as our adaptation of state-of-the-art approaches to semantic change detection and semantic leadership induction. We find substantial evidence of the leadership role of BLM activists and progressives, as well as Black celebrities. We also find evidence of the sustained engagement of the conservative community with this discourse, suggesting an alternative explanation for how we arrived at the present moment, in which "anti-woke" and "anti-CRT" bills are being enacted nationwide.