Britain
Photo: The statue of Edward Colston was pushed into the harbour after being toppled by protesters, BBC News, PA Media, 2020.
BLACK LIVES MATTER: The Power of Social Media in Protest written by Caroline Rayner
T
he killing of African-American George Floyd on May 25th in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the U.S by four white police officers sparked a global movement of outrage and protest, under the slogan “Black Lives Matter” (BLM).
Millions of individuals took to the streets to express their deep rage and sadness about this horrific event, as well as against the omnipresent racism in our society. The BLM movement did not leave the United Kingdom exempt, as it raised several heated discussions on the legitimacy of countless statues of figures with direct or indirect ties to slavery. On June 7th, the statue of the seventeenth-century merchant Edward Colston in Bristol was toppled during a BLM protest, before being replaced by a statue of a BLM protester by the contemporary artist Marc Quinn. Meanwhile, in Oxford, students have expressed their fundamental disagreement with particular statues around the university. Coinciding with the height of the coronavirus pandemic and British lockdown, this event assumed an even more distinct and unique aspect. With many unable to join the protests in person, people displayed their public outrage online. The London protest on June 7th alone saw 22,000 people join online via zoom, Instagram and Facebook Live.
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have been powerful weapons in the hands of protestors in recent weeks, leading us to ask: what role did social media have in the toppling of the statues in the United Kingdom? Could social media continue to inspire protest movements in the future? There is no doubt that, nowadays, social media accelerates communication and the spreading of news. This is also the case for the Black Lives Matter movement - founded online in 2013. The hashtag “Black Lives Matter” has now been used over 30 million times on social network Twitter alone. In particular, when it came to the toppling of statues, both social media and the internet were extremely vital to the movement. After the Edward Colston statue was toppled and pulled into the Bristol harbour, countless online petitions started circulating, demanding the toppling of other offensive statues across the country. Hashtag #toppletheracists came to life in order to denounce and accelerate the process of removing statues of controversial figures. Another controversial case that was widely discussed in the media was that of the statue of Cecil John Rhodes, located in Oriel College Oxford. A firm believer in British imperialism and white supremacy, his statue was condemned by countless students in what is an increas-
Autumn 2020 • Dialogue 49
