From Blue Lives Matter to Black Lives Matter: Hashtag Hijacking During the George Floyd Protests

• In Event: 40214 - Digital Sociology: Politics, Artificial Intelligence, and Online Community

Abstract

This study examines how K-Pop fan communities strategically hijacked the #BlueLivesMatter hashtag during the 2020 George Floyd protests, effectively transforming social media discourse through coordinated digital activism. Drawing on a dataset of 424,178 tweets and 1,000 randomly selected images (500 before and 500 after the May 31, 2020 hijacking event), we employ computer vision analysis through GPT-4 Vision to identify thematic changes in visual content, supplemented by Structural Topic Modeling to uncover broader patterns in theme prevalence and co-occurrence. The analysis reveals dramatic shifts in visual discourse following the hijacking event. Police-related imagery decreased from 38.4% to 2.7% of images, while K-Pop content surged from 0.2% to 28.0%. Topic modeling further demonstrates how thematic clusters shifted, with visual themes related to police commemoration and patriotism being displaced by K-Pop performances and fan culture. This transformation represented a strategic disruption of hashtags designed to counter racial justice movements. When the Dallas Police Department solicited evidence of protest activities, K-Pop fans responded by flooding #BlueLivesMatter with unrelated content, effectively preventing the original messages from reaching their intended audience. Unlike individual trolling, the diffuse nature of hashtag hijacking prevents the identification of specific oppositional figures while successfully redirecting discourse. However, temporal analysis suggests these effects weren't entirely permanent, indicating that sustained impact requires ongoing coordinated effort from fan communities. This research contributes to our understanding of hashtag activism by documenting how affective bonds within fan communities can motivate collective action, illuminating how online communities leverage visual strategies to shape social and political discourse through non-traditional forms of digital resistance.

Authors

• Alejanda Regla-Vargas, University of Pennsylvania

• AJ Alvero, Cornell University

• Grace Kao, Yale University