Ferguson protests ignite a frenzy on social media

November 27, 2014 at 12:00a.m.

Combined dispatches

WASHINGTON

Ferguson protests have now gone viral, a hybrid of old school and new wave that can skitter in unpredictable directions.

On Friday, the fourth day after a grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown, demonstrations are expected in dozens of cities nationwide. Some activists on social media also have been pushing for a boycott of the post-Thanksgiving Black Friday sales day.

In Ferguson on Wednesday, business owners and residents boarded up windows and cleared away debris as the St. Louis suburb sought a tentative return to normal after two nights of unrest over the grand jury decision.

Also Wednesday, protesters continued to hold scattered demonstrations, including a group that rushed into St. Louis City Hall screaming “Shame, shame.” Police locked down the building and called in more than a hundred extra officers. Three people were arrested.

About 200 demonstrators marched through downtown St. Louis and held a mock trial of Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot and killed the unarmed Brown, who was black, during an Aug. 9 struggle.

Some demonstrations to date, such as a Tuesday evening rally at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, have been marked by public prayer and song. Others have been more kinetic, in cities such as Oakland, Calif. Taken together, all reflect the varied face of 21st-century social protest.

“When you see people kneeling down on the highway, they’re trained to do that. It is just straight-up tactics from the civil rights movement,” James Peterson, director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa., said in an interview Wednesday. “But social media certainly has been a great tool.”

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, has been flooded with Ferguson-related postings. Between Tuesday and Wednesday, 580,000 tweets citing Ferguson were counted by the analytical service Topsy. One targeted hashtag, BlackLivesMatter, was included in 72,000 tweets in just one day.

Underscoring the reach of social media, prisoners at Boston’s South Bay Detention Facility held up signs reading “BlackLivesMatter” to high-security windows. Other social media venues, such as Facebook, have likewise been aflame with Ferguson news and commentary. One page alone, called Justice for Mike Brown, had accumulated 43,934 “Likes” as of Wednesday.

“So many people are getting information from their friends or circles of people they know,” Frank Sesno, director of George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs and a former CNN Washington bureau chief, said in an interview Wednesday. “What’s changed is word of mouth is much faster, more powerful. The amplifier role of social media has gotten bigger and louder.”

With its low cost and ease of use, social media enables anyone to become an organizer on the fly, and potentially reach a wide audience without help of a traditional organization. The Black Friday boycott, for instance, is the inaugural effort of a several-month-old group calling itself Blackout for Human Rights.

Founded by Ryan Coogler, director of the acclaimed film “Fruitvale Station,” the group has used such social media tools as Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook to attract activists.

“An affront to any citizen’s human rights threatens the liberty of all,” the group states on its website. “So, we participate in one of the most time honored American traditions: dissent.”

Traditional media, too, has fanned the flames of the Ferguson story, though some outlets have been more aggressive about it.

than others. CNN, for one, has had Ferguson updates on constant rotation, while Fox News has spread its attention more liberally across other topics.