2015: The birth of a new civil rights movement?

And then Michael Brown as shot, and the Twitterverse exploded again. Protesters and news outlets headed to Ferguson. Jackson, the professor from Northeastern, worked with other researchers to map the routes that the hashtags for those stories took on Twitter, via retweets and favorites, to reach the broader public. “What we saw was the first people who hashtagged Mike Brown’s name were young people who lived in Ferguson and who saw his body laying in the street,” Jackson said. “The people driving the Michael Brown story and Ferguson—and this is also true of the Trayvon Martin case—were young and had some connection to the victim. It was young folks from those communities who don’t necessarily tweet about political things or even have many followers.”

The hashtags in those stories were picked up by an ever-widening spiral of Twitter users: friends of the hashtag originators, friends of their friends, then local grass-roots groups who are plugged into the community begin tweeting about it. Eventually—but always last, Jackson said—those conversations land on the radars of national civil rights groups and elite media.

But the researchers noted an important change in the way that happened this summer after the Brown shooting: that timeline is becoming more and more condensed. “It’s happening way faster,” Jackson said. The Trayvon Martin shooting churned on social media for weeks before it was getting national coverage. By the time of the Ferguson incident, Jackson said the lag time was “hours, at most.”