BLMtwitter: The Black Lives Matter (BLM) Twitter Corpus
Maurits van der Veen · 2022
In May 2020, the murder of George Floyd led to protests throughout the United States and around the world. Along with these protests, social media platforms saw a dramatic increase in the volume of discussion regarding Black Lives Matter (BLM). Two years on, online discussion of BLM continues to be lively, not just in the United States but also internationally. This paper introduces one of the most extensive collections of Black Lives Matter tweets available, covering from 2010 through May 2022 and including nearly 50 million tweets overall. Parallel corpora for All Lives Matter and Blue Lives matter are similarly collected. I describe the corpus construction process, including selection criteria for tweets using the BLM acronym. The paper provides a summary description of key dimensions of the three corpora, including patterns in tweet counts over time as well as the number of distinct users and the volume of tweets in languages other than English. The corpus is publicly available and updated regularly.