YARIMAR BONILLA
Rutgers University
JONATHAN ROSA
University of Massachusetts Amherst #Ferguson:
Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics
of social media in the United States A B S T R A C T
As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of
Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal police
shooting of unarmed African American teenager
Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, news and
commentary on the shooting, the protests, and the
militarized response that followed circulated widely
through social media networks. Through a
theorization of hashtag usage, we discuss how and
why social media platforms have become powerful
sites for documenting and challenging episodes of
police brutality and the misrepresentation of
racialized bodies in mainstream media. We show
how engaging in “hashtag activism” can forge a
shared political temporality, and, additionally, we
examine how social media platforms can provide
strategic outlets for contesting and reimagining the
materiality of racialized bodies. Our analysis
combines approaches from linguistic anthropology
and social movements research to investigate the
semiotics of digital protest and to interrogate both
the possibilities and the pitfalls of engaging in
“hashtag ethnography.” [digital anthropology, digital
activism, social movements, social media, semiotics,
race, Twitter, Michael Brown, United States] n Saturday, August 9, 2014, at 12:03 p.m., an unarmed black
teenager named Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, a small town on the outskirts of St.
Louis. Within the hour, a post appeared on the Twitter social
media platform stating, “I just saw someone die,” followed by
a photograph taken from behind the beams of a small wooden balcony
overlooking Canfield Drive, where Michael Brown’s lifeless body lay uncovered, hands alongside his head, face down on the asphalt.1 Immediately
following the incident, community members assembled to demand an explanation for why this unarmed 18-year-old had been seemingly executed
while reportedly holding his hands up in a gesture of surrender, pleading “don’t shoot.” The impromptu gathering soon turned into a sustained
protest marked by daily demonstrations and violent confrontations with
highly armed local police—all of which were documented in detail across
social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Vine.
Occurring on the heels of other highly publicized killings of unarmed
black men—such as Eric Garner (who died as a result of an illegal chokehold by New York City police just weeks before the events in Ferguson), Oscar Grant (whose death was emotionally portrayed in the award-winning
film Fruitvale Station released just one year prior), and 17-year-old Trayvon
Martin (whose 2012 killing sparked national outcry and spurred numerous forms of activism)—the death of Michael Brown quickly captured
the imagination of thousands across and beyond the United States.2
Protestors from around the nation flocked to Ferguson to participate in
demonstrations calling for the arrest of the officer responsible for the fatal shooting. Television viewers tuned in across the country to watch live
news coverage of the violent confrontations between the protestors and
the highly armed local police. Images of these confrontations circulated
widely in national and international news coverage, and news of these
events quickly went “viral” across social media. During the initial week
of protests, over 3.6 million posts appeared on Twitter documenting and
reflecting on the emerging details surrounding Michael Brown’s death; O AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 42, No. 1, pp. 4–17, ISSN 0094-0496, online
C 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1548-1425. 
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12112 #Ferguson by the end of the month, “#Ferguson” had appeared more
than eight million times on the Twitter platform.
These statements are simple facts, but the meaning and
consequences of these facts will be occupying social analysts for years to come. Much will be written about Michael
Brown: about his portrayal in the media, his treatment by
the police, and both the circumstances and consequences
of his death. Much will also be written about the protestors
who immediately gathered at the site of his killing and
about those who remained, under intense police harassment, long after the media spotlight faded.3 But what are
we to make of the eight million tweets? What do they tell
us about this event, its place in the social imagination, and
about social media itself as a site of both political activism
and social analysis?
In 1991, a homemade VHS tape of Los Angeles resident Rodney King being brutally beaten by four police
officers sparked outrage across the country and galvanized
thousands in what is widely recognized as one of the most
influential examples of citizen journalism in the United
States (Allan and Thorsen 2009).4 Today, 56 percent of the
U.S. population carries video-enabled smartphones, and
the use of mobile technology is particularly high among
African Americans.5 The increased use and availability
of these technologies has provided marginalized and
racialized populations with new tools for documenting
incidents of state-sanctioned violence and contesting media representations of racialized bodies and marginalized
communities. In many cases—such as police officers’ use
of a chokehold in the murder of Eric Garner—the use of
mobile technology to record and circulate footage of events
has played a key role in prompting public outcry.6 In the
case of Ferguson, video footage of the fatal shooting of
Michael Brown has yet to surface, but informal journalism
was used to document the scene in the direct aftermath
of his murder, to publicize the protests that ensued, and
to bring attention to the militarized police confrontations
that followed.7 Through social media, users were able to
disseminate these accounts to a broad audience and to
forge new mediatized publics that demand anthropological
attention. In this essay, we explore how and why platforms
like Twitter have become important sites for activism
around issues of racial inequality, state violence, and
media representations. We examine the possibilities, the
stakes, and the necessity of taking these forms of activism
seriously while remaining attentive to the limits and possible pitfalls of engaging in what we describe as “hashtag
ethnography.” Can a hashtag become a field site?
In thinking critically about social media as a site of analysis, the first question to ask, for anthropologists in partic-  American Ethnologist ular, is what kind of field site does a platform like Twitter
represent?8 Is Twitter the ultimate “non-place” (Aug´e 2009)
of super modernity, a transient site of fleeting engagement,
or is it an instance of a “virtual world” (Boellstorff 2008),
with its own set of socialities and forms of engagement? And
is the study of an event through social media a return to
a previous era of “armchair anthropology”? Or is hashtag
ethnography the next logical step in an anthropology of the
21st century, one that has become increasingly concerned
with the ontological implications of digital practices (Horst
and Miller 2012)?
To answer these questions, it is necessary to begin
by distinguishing the town of Ferguson, Missouri, from
“hashtag Ferguson” and to recognize how each of these contributed to the formation of the larger “event” of Ferguson.
As those familiar with Twitter know, the hashtag symbol
(#) is often used as a way of marking a conversation within
this platform. The hasthtag serves as an indexing system
in both the clerical sense and the semiotic sense. In the
clerical sense, it allows the ordering and quick retrieval of
information about a specific topic. For example, in the case
of Ferguson, as details were emerging about the protests
forming at the site of Michael Brown’s death, users began
tweeting out information with the hashtag #Ferguson. The
hashtag in this case provided a quick retrieval system for
someone looking for updated news on the unfolding events.
But, in addition to providing a filing system, hashtags simultaneously function semiotically by marking the intended
significance of an utterance. Similar to the coding systems
employed by anthropologists, hashtags allow users to not
simply “file” their comments but to performatively frame
what these comments are “really about,” thereby enabling
users to indicate a meaning that might not be otherwise apparent. Hence, someone could write, “Decades of racial tension and increasing suburban poverty boiled to the surface
last night” followed by the text “#Ferguson,” as a way of creating a particular interpretive frame. Hashtags thus operate
in ways similar to library call numbers: They locate texts
within a specific conversation, allowing for their quick retrieval, while also marking texts as being “about” a specific
topic.9
In addition, hashtags have the intertextual potential to
link a broad range of tweets on a given topic or disparate
topics as part of an intertextual chain, regardless of whether,
from a given perspective, these tweets have anything to do
with one another. Thus, a tweet in support of Ferguson
protestors and a tweet in support of Officer Darren Wilson
could both be coded and filed under #Ferguson. Moreover,
a tweet about racial disparity in Missouri, such as “racism
lives here,” and one about a night out on the town in St.
Louis could both be marked #STL.
This insight requires anthropologists to carefully consider the variety of uses in play for any given hashtag as 5 American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 1 February 2015 well as the stances and perspectives associated with any
given use. In the case of #Ferguson, patterns emerged in
which Twitter became a platform for providing emergent
information about the killing of Michael Brown and for
commenting on the treatment of the officer who shot
him. For example, one user posted, “Prosecutors get real
friendly when they have to adjudicate one of their own.
But they’ll move heaven and earth hunting POC down.
#Ferguson.”10 In contrast, other tweets recontextualized
the situation in Ferguson as part of global affairs (e.g.,
“#Egypt #Palestine #Ferguson #Turkey, U.S. made tear gas,
sold on the almighty free market represses democracy”),
while others critiqued the appropriation of this event
(e.g., “seriously though, @FCKH8 never posted ANYTHING
on their Facebook page in support of #Ferguson until
it was time to sell some t-shirts”11 ). Meanwhile, some
tweets combined these genres, such as those involving
self-promotion of one’s own broader commentary on
Ferguson (e.g., “People are talking about #Ferguson all over
the world. Here’s a interview I did for a newspaper in Italy,”
along with a link to an Instagram photo of a newspaper
story) and juxtapositions of #Ferguson with commentary
on mundane aspects of one’s everyday life (e.g., “It’s 3:30 . . .
I’m acting like I don’t gotta be up at 7:30 #Ferguson #HandsUp #MichaelBrown”). This range of uses of #Ferguson,
which encompasses both prevailing and emergent scripts,
demonstrates the importance of considering perspective and function in analyzing intertexual links between
tweets.
In addition to these intertextual considerations, hashtags also have the interdiscursive capacity to lasso accompanying texts and their indexical meanings as part
of a frame. Linkages across hashtags and their accompanying texts—which comprise both other hashtags (e.g.,
#Ferguson, #MichaelBrown, #HandsUp, etc.) and additional
commentary—frame #Ferguson as a kind of mediatized
place.12 It is in this sense that much like one could go
to the library, stand in front of a call number, and find
texts on a particular subject, one could go onto Twitter, type #Ferguson, and find a large number of posts
on the subject at hand. But what is the relationship between this mediatized place—as it is experienced from
outside the boundaries of the geographical context with
which it is associated—and everyday life in what might
be understood as Ferguson proper? How does the mediatization of Ferguson, Missouri, through #Ferguson lead
to the formation of new “ad hoc publics” (Bruns and
Burgess 2011)?13
The types of publics created by Twitter emerge from the
hashtag’s capacity to serve not just as an indexing system
but also as a filter that allows social media users to reduce
the noise of Twitter by cutting into one small slice. However,
this filtering process also has a distorting effect. Social media create a distorted view of events, such that we only get 6 the perspective of the people who are already in our social
network (Garret and Resnick 2011; Pariser 2012; Sunstein
2009). This effect should signal one of the first cautions for
anthropologists interested in social media: We must avoid
the common slippage made by journalists and others who
tend to represent Twitter as an unproblematized “public
sphere” without taking into account the complexity of who
is on Twitter, as well as how people are on Twitter in different ways (e.g., some are constant users, others tweet infrequently, some do so from their phone, some from their
office, etc.).14
Part of the problem of engaging in hashtag ethnography, then, is that it is difficult to assess the context of social
media utterances. Moreover, a simple statement of fact—for
example, that there were eight million Ferguson tweets—
tells us very little. How many were critical of the police?
How many were critical of the protestors? How many were
posted by journalists (both professional and amateur)? Beyond knowing that people tweeted, we know little about
what those tweets meant to their authors and their imagined publics. We do not know, for example, how many of
the eight million tweets were aimed at a national audience
(and thus appropriately hashtagged for quick retrieval and
retweet) versus how many were aimed at a smaller group
of followers with the contextual information necessary to
assess both the explicit and implicit uses of hashtags and
other references.
In thinking about the hashtag as a field site, these
questions and the competing perspectives they highlight
demonstrate the importance of reorienting social media
ethnography from an emphasis on “network and community” toward a focus on individual experiences, practices,
and socialities (Postill and Pink 2012:124). For example,
some have argued that in assessing the importance of
Twitter in the Ferguson protests, we must take into account
that, despite the enduring digital divide within the United
States, the percentage of African Americans who use Twitter
(22 percent) is much higher than that of white Americans
(16 percent; Bryers 2014). While these simple figures tell
us little about the ways and frequency with which these
groups use the system and to what ends, the significance of
what has been called “Black Twitter” (Florini 2014; Sharma
2013) should not be overlooked. As we discuss below,
Twitter affords a unique platform for collectively identifying, articulating, and contesting racial injustices from the
in-group perspectives of racialized populations. Whereas
in most mainstream media contexts the experiences of
racialized populations are overdetermined, stereotyped,
or tokenized, social media platforms such as Twitter offer
sites for collectively constructing counternarratives and
reimagining group identities.15
In the case of Ferguson, it is worth noting that, at least
initially, the most common use of the #Ferguson hashtag
was to convey information about the unfolding events. #Ferguson Before the mainstream media had caught up to what was
happening, the mass of hashtagged tweets was a way of
calling attention to an underreported incident of police
brutality. Well aware of the algorithmic nature of Twitter,
users were purposefully hashtagging to make Ferguson
“trend.”16 However, once Ferguson had stabilized as an
important news event, many began tweeting about the
events without necessarily marking their posts with a hashtag. Some local residents, for example, marked their tweets
#STL (i.e., the common hashtag for a post referencing St.
Louis), and others did not mark their tweets at all. The only
way to really know what these tweets were “about” was to
view them in the context of the individual tweeters themselves: when they were posting, what they had previously
posted, who they had begun following, and what they were
retweeting.
By looking only at tweets marked #Ferguson, one would
miss out on a large number of posts that were “about” Ferguson even though they were not marked as such.17 In many
ways, these tweets form part of the nonplace that is #Ferguson, much as diasporic communities are part of a place
called “home.” If we are to take a hashtag seriously as a
field site, we must thus not assume its fixed and stable
boundaries—any more than we would with other field sites,
which can also appear to be isolated, bounded, and homogenous but are, in practice, much more dispersed, interconnected, and diffuse (Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Trouillot
2003).
However, recognizing that hashstags can only ever offer a limited, partial, and filtered view of a social world
does not require abandoning them as sites of analysis.
Rather, we must approach them as what they are: entry points into larger and more complex worlds. Hashtags offer a window to peep through, but it is only by
stepping through that window and “following” (in both
Twitter and non-Twitter terms) individual users that we
can begin to place tweets within a broader context. This
kind of analysis requires us to stay with those who tweet
and follow them after hashtags have fallen out of “trend.”
Only then can we better understand what brings them
to this virtual place and what they take away from their
engagement.18 The whole world is tweeting
Social movements have long used media and technology
to disseminate, escalate, and enlarge the scope of their
struggles: Transistor radios allowed Cuban guerrilla fighters to transmit from the Sierra Maestra; television coverage
transformed the riots in Selma, Alabama, into a national
event; and e-mail accounts allowed Zapatistas in Chiapas
to launch global communiqu´es. #Ferguson did what many
of these other tools did: It allowed a message to get out,
called global attention to a small corner of the world, and at-  American Ethnologist tempted to bring visibility and accountability to repressive
forces.19
One of the differences between Twitter and these earlier forms of technology, however, is its multivocality and dialogicality (Bakhtin 1981). Twitter does not just allow you to
peer through a window; it allows you to look through manifold windows at once. On #Ferguson, you could watch six
simultaneous live streams. You could read what protestors
were tweeting, what journalists were reporting, what the
police was announcing, and how observers and analysts interpreted the unfolding events. You could also learn how
thousands of users were reacting to the numerous posts.
In the era of transistor radios and television sets, one did
not necessarily know what listeners or viewers yelled back
at their machines, but on Twitter one can get a sense of individual responses to mediatized events.
E-mail, television, radio, and print have long managed
to open up windows into the experience of social movements, but the dialogicality and temporality of Twitter create a unique feeling of direct participation. Twitter allows
users who are territorially displaced to feel like they are
united across both space and time. For example, during
the 2014 World Cup (just a month before the events in
Ferguson), the Nigerian American novelist and avid tweeter
Teju Cole encouraged his followers to post pictures of their
individual views of the matches and to mark these posts
with the hashtag #The time of the game.20 “We live in different time zones, out of sync but aware of each other,” he
wrote, “then the game begins and we enter the same time:
the time of the game” (Meyer 2014). For Cole, the point was
to highlight how a global audience could enter into a shared
temporality that he described as “public time” (a counterpart to public space).
#Ferguson and its attendant live streams created a
similar feeling of shared temporality—particularly during
the protests and confrontations with police. As opposed
to someone who might post about Ferguson on Facebook, users on Twitter felt like they were participating in
#Ferguson, as they tweeted in real time about the unfolding events, rallied supporters to join various hashtag
campaigns (discussed below), and monitored live streams
where they could bear witness to the tear gassing and
arrests of journalists and protestors. Engaging in these
activities is akin to participating in a protest in the sense
that it offers an experience of “real time” engagement,
community, and even collective effervescence. Through
this form of participation, users can experience the heightened temporality that characterizes all social movements:
the way days marked by protest become “eventful,”
distinguishing them from quotidian life. The “eventfulness”
of protest-filled days cannot be easily summed up in dated
news bulletins; indeed, they often challenge calendrical
time itself—thus, not coincidentally, social movement
actors often develop their own revolutionary calendars, 7 American Ethnologist  Volume 42 Number 1 February 2015 chronicles, timelines, and alternative forms of marking
political time.21 It was partly because of this heightened
temporality that, as others have noted, the news surrounding Michael Brown’s death dominated Twitter much
more than Facebook.22 Facebook moved too slowly for the
eventfulness of Ferguson. For the denizens of #Ferguson,
the posts on Facebook were “yesterday’s news”—always
already superseded by the latest round of tweets.23 Hashtag activism versus “real” activism?
Many have disparaged hashtag activism as a poor substitute
for “real” activism, and, indeed, some suggest that the virality and ephemerality of social media can only ever produce
fleeting “nanostories” (Wasik 2009) with little lasting impact. However, it is important to examine how and why digital activism has become salient to particular populations. It
is surely not coincidental that the groups most likely to experience police brutality, to have their protests disparaged
as acts of “rioting” or “looting,” and to be misrepresented in
the media are precisely those turning to digital activism at
the highest rates. Indeed, some of the most important hashtag campaigns emerging out of #Ferguson were targeted at
calling attention to both police practices and media representations, suggesting that social media can serve as an
important tool for challenging these various forms of racial
profiling.
The first of these campaigns was inspired by eyewitness
reports that Michael Brown had his hands up in the air as a
sign of surrender and had uttered the words don’t shoot just
before he was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson. Initial activism around Michael Brown thus revolved around
the hashtag #HandsUpDontShoot, often accompanied by
photos of individuals or groups of people with their hands
up.24 One of the most widely circulated images from this
meme was that of Howard University students with their
hands up. (See Figure 1.)
Through this campaign, users sought to call attention
to the arbitrary nature of racialized policing, the vulnerability of black bodies, and the problematic ways in which
blackness is perceived as a constant threat.25 Because
Michael Brown was allegedly shot while holding his hands
up, #HandsUpDontShoot also became a tool for contesting
victim-blaming or respectability narratives rooted in the
belief that one can control the perception of one’s body and
the violence inflicted on it. These efforts echoed a previous
“meme” that emerged in response to the killing of another
unarmed African American teenager, Trayvon Martin, two
years earlier.26 Shortly following Martin’s killing, a recording
of the 911 call made by George Zimmerman, the killer,
describing Martin as someone “suspicious” wearing a “dark
hoodie,” circulated widely in the press. Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera suggested that the hoodie was
“as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George 8 Zimmerman” (Geraldo Rivera: “Leave the Hoodie at Home”
2012). Rivera argued that hoodies had become emblematic
of criminal behavior, given their ubiquitous presence in
crime-suspect drawings and surveillance footage of petty
theft. This argument elides the role that race plays in structuring the hoodie’s alternate status as an innocuous piece
of clothing versus a sign of criminality or deviance. That is,
hoodies are only signs of criminal behavior when they are
contextualized in relation to particular racialized bodies.27
Many commentators sought to draw attention to this point.
In the wake of Trayvon Martin’s death,...

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