(Ezekiel Loseke, Headline USA) Ten years after the start of the movement, more than a third of the tweets containing the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter have been made unavailable, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.
Tweets were made unavailable by users deleting posts, deleting their account, hiding posts, making their account private or getting suspended from Twitter, according to Axios.
At the arrival of its decade milestone, the trend is one of several indications that the Black Lives Matter movement is not aging well.
“Black Lives Matter is one of the most prominent social movements to develop and evolve entirely within the social media era,” Pew noted, explaining why BLM’s online footprint might be a gauge of its broader public perception.
Pew’s analysis examined tweets between 2013 to 2021, ostensibly at the peak of BLM’s influence. It suggested that many of those who telegraphed their public shows of support had, for one reason or another, removed them after the fact.
“As much as 40% of those posted during the summer of 2020 … are no longer accessible on Twitter,” the report noted, referring to the swell of numbers that accompanied nationwide race riots in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.
Despite the waning support, over 44 million tweets featuring the hashtag still exist on Twitter, Pew reported.
Sam Bestvater, a computational social scientist at Pew, claimed that the decline in available tweets was partially a result of the design of social-media platforms.
“While modern protest movements may have come to rely on social media platforms pretty considerably, these platforms weren’t really designed to be cultural archives,” he said. “The records they contain can degrade over time, and they might not be around forever.”
At its peak in 2020, BLM boasted a 66% share of American adults that supported the movement. However, this month the Pew Research Center released a survey indicating that only 51% of American adults currently support the movement.
The decline in tweets and support was preceded by numerous scandals involving the organizations members and leadership:
- The movement itself is broke, but its leaders continue to collect millions from the brand.
- The organization paid over $4 million to one of the co-founder’s baby-daddy.
- The movement’s co-founder lost a contract with Warner Brothers because her contract “did not result in any produced shows.”
- A co-founder of the movement owns a $6 million mansion which was purchased by the organization in 2021.
- A BLM leader in Boston was indicted on over 20 charges of fraud.
- The movement was so fraudulent the IRS threatened to revoke its charity status.
- A BLM leader intentionally released hundreds of cockroaches in a New York City Courthouse.
- A BLM activist got another student expelled from the University of Virginia by fabricating hateful statements.
- Black Lives Matters rioters destroyed a statute of a Catholic saint in California.
