Waves of attention to racial injustice on social media: Extrajudicial police killings in the United States as focusing events

Abstract

The deaths of Black victims of police brutality, such as George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, and Philando Castile, have become focusing events and symbols for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, catalyzing wide-spread public attention to racial injustice. While prior studies on hashtag activism predominantly focus on single and widely known cases, less is understood about why some incidents draw massive public attention while others do not. Addressing this gap, our study investigates the factors influencing the likelihood and size of public attention on Twitter (now X) following extrajudicial police killings. We analyzed 1.5 million tweets in response to 795 police killings between January 1, 2015, and December 8, 2016, in the United States. By examining cases on all scales, from unnoticed to prominent, we provide large-scale empirical evidence on disparities in public attention to police killings and their victims. Results indicate two distinct processes in the emergence of focusing events: While victims’ attributes such as race, age, and gender increased likelihood of receiving any attention (thresholding), variables of context and social construction were related to overall wave size (focusing).