“These Anarchists, not protesters, are Biden voters, but he has no control and nothing to say. Disgraceful. Never seen anything like it. Thugs!"
- Donald Trump, quoted from a Tweet on September 8 th 2020
This false narrative portraying protesters as violent extremists was
disseminated in an attempt to sway public opinion against the cause and further
influence the political discourse. Donald Trump and other far-right individuals
leveraged social media platforms (like Twitter) to amplify their messages whilst
reaching a wider audience.
To retaliate against the online #BlackLivesMatter movement, far-right
opposition began using #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter as counter- slogans to undermine the message of the BLM movement. 122 Far-right groups
strategically utilised hashtags and trends to insert their narratives into online
discussions, exploiting the algorithms that prioritised selective content. As
depicted in Figure 8, although the rate of use was less, #BlueLivesMatter
remained parallel with #BlackLivesMatter, rising and falling with each major incident of police brutality. 123 Doing this enabled them to infiltrate online
discussions related to the movement, aiming to foster division and eventually
break up the narratives surrounding the protests, thus, effectively diverting attention away from the core issues of the movement itself. 124
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