BLM Movement Frames Among the Muted Voices: Actor-Generated Infographics on Instagram During #BlackoutTuesday

Abstract

Within the context of social movements, movement frames define social or political problems and guide movement participants to address those issues. As a decentralized movement, #BlackLivesMatter (#BLM) invited audiences to appropriate the hashtag and use it to illuminate numerous issues that affect Black Americans. This article focuses on the infographics that were generated and circulated in association with #BlackoutTuesday on Instagram to understand user-generated movement frames for the #BLM movement. Our theme analysis yielded four themes representative of user-generated movement frames, including (a) sharing antiracist information (e.g., information about police brutality, statistics illustrating racial disparities, portrayals of systemic racism, refutations of oppositional arguments, and defining and clarifying antiracist vocabulary), (b) amplifying Black voices, (c) tips for performing allyship, and (d) calls to action. We discuss how user-generated themes on Instagram work within the BLM movement and how visual texts support movements on social media more generally.