Race a bigger issue for black people on social media than whites

With a long narrative history that goes back to 19th and 20th century, the racial war in the United States has become more virtual in the 21st century, thanks to the social media. Not just this, there is apparently a change in character too with regard to the racial configuration.

According to a recent study by Pew Research there are severe differences in how white Americans and black Americans deal about race on social media.

The study, which surveyed 3,769 adults between Feb. 29 and May 8 and analyzed 995 million tweets about race from Jan. 1, 2015, to March 31, 2016, found that black social media users are twice as likely as white users to say that Facebook and Twitter posts are about race.

While 28 percent of black users share posts about race, only 8 percent of white users share such posts. 68 percent of black social media users report seeing at least some race-focused content on their feeds, only 35 percent of white users and 54 percent of Hispanic (Spanish-speaking) users do.

According to a separate analysis by Pew from July 5–17, 2016, that counted tweets in the aftermath of the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile by police officers and the attacks that killed nine police officers in Dallas and three officers in Baton Rouge, 33 percent of the tweets using #BlackLivesMatter during this period criticized it, three times as many as during the previously analyzed time frame. Following the Dallas attack specifically, 39 percent of #BlackLivesMatter tweets opposed the movement compared with 28 percent in support and 33 percent neutral.

The study also examined nearly 1 billion racially focused tweets and determined that the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was used 12 million times between July 2013 when it first appeared and the end of March of this year.

Of the nearly 1 billion tweets that dealt with race, 10 percent were about the 2016 campaign and “Republican candidate Donald Trump was the subject of many of these,” indicating, the presidential election was also one of the major sources of conversation around race.

Pew reports, “Issues related to the police or judicial system made up an additional 7 percent of the conversation surrounding race, while discussions of race in the context of pop culture events accounted for 7 percent of the overall Twitter conversation around race.”