#Ferguson: How Twitter helped empower ordinary residents

As a national spotlight increasingly came to shine on Ferguson (MO), catapulting the nascent Black Lives Matter movement into prominence, local voices – some activists and other ordinary residents – stayed prominent online, chronicling the protests and police response as they occurred particularly on Twitter, two researchers from Northeastern University found.

“We hypothesized that people who got in early on who were not elites had an influence in shaping the story,” says Sarah Jackson, an assistant professor of communication who co-authored a paper looking at the Twitter networks spreading information during the first days of the Ferguson protests. It was published last month in the journal Information, Communication and Society. “They were talking about it from a perspective that acknowledges the roles police violence plays in African-American communities, and it was really not what we see in mainstream media, which is perspectives coming from the police or from elites." How social media was used also played a key role.