In the wake of George Floyd’s murder the Black Lives Matter movement surged around the US (and beyond). In the following days, local updates from official channels were infrequent and lagged behind real time events; social media became the primary source of insight for many people trying to understand events on the ground. This basic analysis was conducted on tweets using the hashtag #dcprotests in the week+ from May 29th to June 7th.

** A MAJOR DISCLAIMER: this analysis is neither exhaustive nor statistically significant. Twitter includes tweets from trolls and bots, and the voices of more active tweeters are awarded disproportionate weight. However, this preliminary analysis nonetheless provided important insight into the activity on the ground in Washington, DC in real time. **

Full code, description and instructions can be found here.