A closer look

Twitter and the Ferguson Uprising

How did activists, protesters, reporters, and observers use Twitter as a tool during and after the Ferguson uprising?

by Carli Snyder, American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, CUNY

On August 9, 2014, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a small city near St. Louis. Brown’s body was left in the street for over four hours. Crowds gathered that night and began to organize peaceful vigils. Ferguson residents also used their cell phones to share images and videos of Brown’s corpse via text messages and social media platforms. They posted images on their Instagram accounts and live streamed on Periscope. Along with these and other social media sites, Twitter, a site on which users could post short text and image posts called “tweets,” became a powerful platform to share residents’ outrage and developments in the unfolding story. The murder, the eventual nonindictment of Wilson, and the notorious history of police harassment and abuse in the town led to multiple waves of weekslong protests in the predominantly Black community.

Twitter offered certain functions that other forms of media did not: activists and protesters could control their message, and could amplify each other’s voices by reposting tweets, or retweeting. Tweets humanized Brown and emphasized that he was an unarmed teenager. Twitter became a critical tool to express anger, facilitate organizing efforts, and document the events from the perspective of the people of Ferguson. Since users could share images, videos, and written thoughts all at once on Twitter, it became a centralized platform for dispatches from the ground. The use of searchable hashtags and the retweet function helped people on the ground to center and recenter the murder in conversations for months after it happened. For example, the image of Darren Wilson standing over Brown’s body, originally taken and posted by Ferguson-based rapper Thee Pharoah, was retweeted at the moment of Brown’s death, then again throughout the protests, and again during the nonindictment, a total of more than forty-one thousand times.

On the Streets of Ferguson

As protests escalated, young Black people turned to Twitter in the face of the militarized police response and the state of emergency declared by Governor Jay Nixon, who also called in the National Guard. Young people previously uninvolved in activism stepped into a movement by tweeting their thoughts, connecting with those around them, and coming out into the streets together. Historian Barbara Ransby interviewed numerous activists, including Johnetta (Netta) Elzie, Brittany Ferrell, Alexis Templeton, and Kayla Reed. Elzie, who grew up in St. Louis, began to tweet regularly after learning about Brown’s death, and returned to the streets night after night. She became one of the most visible activists of the uprising. Activists utilized Twitter to form new groups such as Millennial Activists United (MAU). They used Twitter to publicize the group, to post its agenda, and to announce upcoming meetings and actions. The founders of MAU knew that they could reach more millennials through social media, signaling a generational shift in activism strategies. Organizing via Twitter challenged traditionally hierarchical leadership structures and helped younger people find their voices. At the same time, off-line longtime elder activists shared with rising leaders wisdom from their experience in previous movements, which encouraged the growth of intergenerational traditions. Twitter served as a tool for MAU and other activist groups, predominantly led by Black women and queer people, to organize and sustain actions throughout their campaign, #FergusonOctober, in advocating for the indictment of Wilson.

Through Twitter, activists were able to create an alternative to mainstream journalism’s presentation of Brown’s murder and the subsequent protests. When news anchors reported about the Ferguson uprising on national television news programs, they frequently referred to the protests as “riots” and emphasized violence, looting, and property destruction. These news outlets often ignored the police force’s role in provoking reactions of self-defense by protesters. Peaceful vigils did not simply “turn into” violence. In contrast, Twitter users showed how sending in armored tanks and local and state police in military gear, along with other intimidation tactics, led to acts of rebellion. In the streets, protesters photographed, videoed, and described how captured police deployed tear gas, rubber bullets, and snipers against them. Many protesters used Twitter to chronicle their arrests and subsequent release from jail.

The Uprising Beyond Ferguson

Although Michael Brown was by no means the only Black man murdered by police in 2014, his death sparked a nationwide movement against police brutality, largely galvanized by the sustained focus that social media users brought to the incident. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag—previously created in July 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of Trayvon Martin—became nationally prominent once it was used broadly in the wake of Brown’s murder. Americans tweeted more about the Michael Brown murder than anything else that year. A national virtual network of Black commentators, activists, professors, and everyday people, often referred to as “Black Twitter,” played a central role in shaping the discourse about the uprising. Importantly, many journalists also used Twitter and sometimes based their reporting on tweets from people in Ferguson. National news coverage and Twitter were not mutually exclusive. Chris Hayes, a prominent anchor on the cable network MSNBC, for example, said that he relied on tweets to present information to viewers from the perspective of activists and protesters.

Politically conservative Twitter users, including media commentators and outlets, began to develop their own counternarrative, in which they attempted to reframe the focus of discourse onto looting and the “lawlessness” of the protests. Their posts praised accused police officers and vilified Michael Brown. Others simply objected to the level of attention that the protests received.

The uprising also took on international dimensions, largely due to the trending of #Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter, and other hashtags. Activists from around the world expressed solidarity with the people of Ferguson, including Palestinian activists, who offered advice about how to deal with the effects of tear gas. [Document 4] Following the St. Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson, protests spread nationally to other cities in November 2014. These protests sparked a larger national conversation about police brutality, anti-Black racism, and the criminal justice system.

Ongoing Influence of Twitter

Throughout the most intense moments of the uprising as well as its more quiet phases, Twitter served another important role as a democratic form of education and historical documentation. History professor Marcia Chatelain, who had attended college at the University of Missouri, thought about how teachers would talk to their students about what was happening. She began a new hashtag, #FergusonSyllabus, to offer a searchable way to share materials that could provide historical context to the situation as it unfolded. She asked for other educators to contribute articles, novels, music, and any other materials that could be used to initiate conversations with students at all age levels. Archivists developed new strategies to collect and maintain tweets for the historical record and for the use of future researchers.

For many reasons, Twitter could not be a long-term strategy for anti-police brutality organizing. In the wake of the protests, activists became vulnerable due to the visibility they gained on Twitter. Law enforcement used activists’ tweets to collect their data and surveil many of them. Prominent activists also became the targets of right-wing social media attacks. This led to ongoing fear of retribution. Netta Elzie, for example, eventually deleted her Twitter account because of the toll it took on her mental health. The social media response to the 2020 murder of George Floyd demonstrated an evolution in social media organizing tactics, but many protest participants expressed frustration that not much had changed since the murder of Michael Brown. Conversations became more complicated about the reposting of images and videos containing violence against Black people—especially because it leads to persistent retraumatization of Black social media users in their day-to-day lives. When entrepreneur Elon Musk purchased Twitter and became its CEO in 2022, the platform became less reliable as a tool for activism based on changes to the system’s functionality and content moderation.

Reflection Questions

Why did activists and protesters turn to Twitter after Michael Brown’s murder?

What motivated young people to join organizing efforts in new ways during the Ferguson uprising?

What was the relationship between on-the-ground updates from Twitter and mainstream media sources?

What are some benefits of using tweets as historical primary sources? What are some limitations?

How are Twitter and other forms of social media used today to respond to cases of police brutality?

Additional Reading

Jules Bergis, Ed Summers, and Vernon Mitchell, Jr, “Ethical Considerations for Archiving Social Media Content Generated by Contemporary Social Movements: Challenges, Opportunities, and Recommendations,” Documenting the Now, April 2018: https://www.docnow.io/docs/docnow-whitepaper-2018.pdf.

Sarah Florini, Beyond Hashtags: Racial Politics and Black Digital Networks (New York: NYU Press, 2019).

Deen Freelon, Charlton D. McIlwain, and Meredith D. Clark, “Beyond the Hashtags” (Washington, D.C. Center for Media and Social Impact, American University, 2016), https://cmsimpact.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/beyond_the_hashtags_2016.pdf.

Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s (New York: Liveright, 2021).

Barbara Ransby, “The Ferguson Uprising and Its Reverberations,” in Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).

Whose Streets?, (New York: Magnolia Pictures, 2017), documentary, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seehHirY_90.

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