The movement for racial equality is respectable — the Black Lives Matter movement spread awareness about injustice and discrimination against African Americans. Yet many consider such movements a trend and take advantage of them to gain more views/likes on social media or seem relevant. What happens when a popular star, whose existence is based on “trendiness,” hops on #BlackLivesMatter? Will people finally consider it seriously, or will the movement become even trendier?
Introduction
In June 2020, the K-Pop boy group BTS donated $1 million to the Black Lives Matter cause. This went viral on Twitter not only because BTS’ public donation, but also because its fanbase, ARMY, donated $1 million as well within 24 hours of BTS’. Below is the code that examines the number of Tweets containing “#BTS”, “#BlackLivesMatter,” and “#Million” over the course of one month (June).
From graphing the data (shown below), I discovered that the number of retweets was, as expected, highest on June 8th — the date that the fans donated $1 million. However, I was surprised to see that the number decreased sharply immediately after the first day. Although there may be various reasons as to why this phenomenon occurred, it is reasonable to infer that such news of celebrities that is normally viewed as “gossip” tend to be popular but short-lived.
Coding Process
To determine the number of tweets containing “#BTS,” “#BlackLivesMatter” and “#Million,” I scraped data from Twitter and used the programming language Python to analyze it. In the tweetCriteria, I used the Query Search “BTS #Blacklivesmatter million,” and I set the date range from the day that BTS donated $1 million until the date that I wrote this code. Because this code was written on a laptop, I set the maximum number of tweets to 100 (setting it to an extremely high number would take longer to process) in order to simply observe the trend.
In the next step, I organized the data that was scraped from Twitter into a table format — I included the date and time that the tweet was posted, the username of the tweet, the tweet text, link, and the number of retweets and favorites. This was then graphed so that the viewers could see the trend more easily.
