A resurgence of online rightwing extremism has benefited from the same digital networking tools (Gallagher et al., 2016 Nagle, 2017 Sobieraj, 2017). However, progressive activists have not been alone in capitalizing on the affordances of social media. The hashtag #blacklivesmatter enabled activists to relate specific and local conflicts to broader questions of racial and social justice. The fast and wide diffusion of protest frames catalyzed a movement, spurring thousands of people to fill the streets not only of Ferguson but of cities across the United States to protest police brutality (Freelon et al., 2016 Ray et al., 2017). In recent years, the hashtag #blacklivesmatter became a powerful demonstration of the potential of digital networking on platforms such as Twitter (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015 Clark, 2014 Freelon et al., 2018 Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2015 van Haperen et al, 2020). These findings demonstrate that movements and countermovements benefit from the affordances of social media in different ways.
A second group of digitally networked extreme right opponents coordinates more in the fashion of a swarm: they synchronize without being rooted in places or embedded in local relations. One group consists of conservatives that are rooted in places but in a markedly different geography than supporters they are more often located outside of major cities and outside of the coastal states. Opponents can be differentiated into two categories. Compared to their adversaries, supporters of #blacklivesmatter are more strongly rooted in places and embedded in local relations, suggesting that their online activism builds on grassroots communities.
We elaborate two different models of coordination: the swarm and the grassroots. How do supporters of the Movement for Black Lives and their opponents coordinate on Twitter? Drawing on a corpus of 18.5 million tweets, this paper compares coordination among supporters and opponents of #blacklivesmatter in terms of relations and spatialities. While activists have effectively used the #blacklivesmatter hashtag to organize protests against police brutality and racism, this success has also drawn out many who use the hashtag to express their opposition.