Black Press #HashtagActivism: Examining Digital Black News Outlets’ Social Media Coverage of Black Lives Matter

This study examines how the digital Black press covered the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests on social media. We conduct a qualitative content analysis of 13 Black press outlets’ Twitter and Instagram posts from February through October 2020. We find that the digital Black press countered the protest paradigm by providing legitimizing coverage of the protests, used hashtags to contextualize BLM and insert counternarratives into the discourse, and practiced social justice journalism by advocating for Black Americans. We therefore conclude that the Black press’ coverage of BLM on social media more closely resembled social media users’ support of the movement, as opposed to mainstream news outlets’ “objective” and delegitimizing coverage.