Words and Action: Modeling Linguistic Leadership in #BlackLivesMatter Communities

In this project, we describe a method of modeling semantic leadership across a set of communities associated with the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has been informed by qualitative research on the structure of social media and Black Twitter in particular. We describe our bespoke approaches to time-binning, community clustering, and connecting communities over time, as well as our adaptation of state-of-the-art approaches to semantic change detection and semantic leadership induction. We find substantial evidence of the leadership role of BLM activists and progressives, as well as Black celebrities. We also find evidence of the sustained engagement of the conservative community with this discourse, suggesting an alternative explanation for how we arrived at the present moment, in which "anti-woke" and "anti-CRT" bills are being enacted nationwide.