# Divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.06820 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06820/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Jun 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Characterizing English Variation across Social Media Communities with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.06820/) (2021)
- [Detecting Political Biases of Named Entities and Hashtags on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.08110/) (2022)
- [Cognitive network science for understanding online social cognitions: A brief review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12799/) (2021)
- [What Truly Matters? Using Linguistic Cues for Analyzing the #BlackLivesMatter Movement and its Counter Protests: 2013 to 2020](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12192/) (2021)
- ["A Tale of Two Movements": Identifying and Comparing Perspectives in #BlackLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter Movements-related Tweets using Weakly Supervised Graph-based Structured Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07155/) (2023)
- [What are People Talking about in #BlackLivesMatter and #StopAsianHate? Exploring and Categorizing Twitter Topics Emerging in Online Social Movements through the Latent Dirichlet Allocation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14725/) (2022)
- [Discursive objection strategies in online comments: Developing a classification schema and validating its training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08142/) (2024)
- [Curating corpora with classifiers: A case study of clean energy sentiment online](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03092/) (2023)
- [Words and Action: Modeling Linguistic Leadership in #BlackLivesMatter Communities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02637/) (2024)
- [Podcasts as a Medium for Participation in Collective Action: A Case Study of Black Lives Matter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13197/) (2025)
- [Can LLMs Cook Jamaican Couscous? A Study of Cultural Novelty in Recipe Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10964/) (2026)
- [A conceptual framework for ideology in online discourse beyond the left and right](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18945/) (2026)
- [Mapping Election Toxicity on Social Media across Issue, Ideology, and Psychosocial Dimensions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16765/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Since the shooting of Black teenager Michael Brown by White police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, the protest hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has amplified critiques of extrajudicial killings of Black Americans. In response to #BlackLivesMatter, other Twitter users have adopted #AllLivesMatter, a counter-protest hashtag whose content argues that equal attention should be given to all lives regardless of race. Through a multi-level analysis of over 860,000 tweets, we study how these protests and counter-protests diverge by quantifying aspects of their discourse. We find that #AllLivesMatter facilitates opposition between #BlackLivesMatter and hashtags such as #PoliceLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter in such a way that historically echoes the tension between Black protesters and law enforcement. In addition, we show that a significant portion of #AllLivesMatter use stems from hijacking by #BlackLivesMatter advocates. Beyond simply injecting #AllLivesMatter with #BlackLivesMatter content, these hijackers use the hashtag to directly confront the counter-protest notion of "All lives matter." Our findings suggest that Black Lives Matter movement was able to grow, exhibit diverse conversations, and avoid derailment on social media by making discussion of counter-protest opinions a central topic of #AllLivesMatter, rather than the movement itself.