Do Activists Prioritize Solutions Over Grievances? A Twitter Study of Black Lives Matter

Abstract

Do social movements shift the focus of their framing from grievances to tactics as they mature? This paper examines the nature of the frames that social movements and activists co-create using the case of Black Lives Matter (BLM). Building on (Snow & Benford, 1988), we explore whether BLM’s frames have evolved from diagnostic to prognostic frames since the movement’s emergence. We compiled a novel tweet dataset collected from Twitter that contains 269,963 tweets sent under the hashtag “BlackLivesMatter” from Jan. 01, 2020, to Dec. 31, 2021. Using time series and network analysis, we show that frames do not naturally evolve from diagnostic to prognostic frames as movements mature. We find that BLM activists increasingly use prognostic frames while expressing their grievances because injustices and discrimination toward the Black continue. The evidence suggests that tweets on tactics and solutions outnumber the grievance-related frames only after Chauvin’s guilty plea alleviates grievances.