Residents in Cardiff, Wales, on June 6 joined in the global protests over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody May 25.
Photo: Ben Birchall/Zuma PressAn Israeli activist addressed a Tel Aviv crowd through a bullhorn about the pain she felt watching video of a police officer kneeling on George Floyd’s neck. Two Danish university students hung a black sheet with the message “Black Lives Matter” over a Copenhagen intersection. A Welsh shop retrofitter marched with thousands of others through Cardiff, chanting “No Justice, No Peace.”
They all helped illustrate the power of social media to galvanize demonstrators globally with lightning speed.
Instagram and Twitter quickly spread raw videos of Mr. Floyd’s violent arrest world-wide. The clips found an audience among activists and some first-time protesters whose values have been shaped by social media in recent years.
While some critics have focused on social media’s propensity to divide societies, in many ways it has united people around a common cause world-wide this time. It is also influencing which actions people take, depending on what catches fire online.
Protesters outside Sydney Town Hall June 6 brought attention to deaths of black people in law-enforcement custody in Australia and paid respects to George Floyd.
Photo: Speed Media/Zuma PressToosheyah Butler, 23, a black Israeli woman, saw the video of Mr. Floyd’s killing in police custody while scrolling through her Instagram feed one morning. Then, as protests enveloped the U.S., her 7-year-old son started seeing videos on TikTok of police beating protesters.
“My son asked me, ‘Were the black people being bad; were they doing something wrong?’” She tried to explain the situation. The next day, a friend messaged Ms. Butler on Facebook and invited her to attend a protest that day.
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“This was my first time actually going to a protest and speaking out,” she said, adding that watching video of Mr. Floyd’s death had “moved her in a new way.”
Sidney Tarrow, an emeritus professor of government at Cornell University who has studied social movements, said social media has a rare ability to galvanize people.
“It condenses the message in a way that newspaper articles and television programs don’t,” he said. The simple, searing image of a police officer with a knee on a black man’s neck required little description, making it easily communicable across cultures, he said.
“Seeing someone die brought me to reality,” said Emily Little, a 20-year-old in Cardiff, Wales. She said the video made her reflect on what she, a white woman, saw as the lack of opportunity for many black people in Wales.
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Despite not being involved in activism before, she decided to organize a rally for June 14, publicizing it online. She says she already has 300 people on Facebook saying they will attend.
Social media “enables a coordination of these protests,” said Simon Lindgren, a professor of sociology at Umeå University in Sweden who researches social networks. “It has this network character. If you reach one you reach two, if you reach two you reach four.”
Social media’s role in spreading protest narratives has also led to controversy. In late May, Twitter shielded from public view a tweet by President Trump that said “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter said it violated its rules about glorifying violence. Facebook took a different tack, finding that the post complied with its rules.
Mr. Trump defended his tweet and has accused Twitter of being politically biased. Meanwhile, civil-rights activists accused Facebook of not doing enough to block hate on the platform. Some Facebook employees staged a virtual walkout.
There are also concerns that manipulated content on social-media platforms could fan unrest. Twitter posted the label “Manipulated media” on widely shared images depicting Derek Chauvin, the police officer who knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck, wearing a red cap with the slogan “Make Whites Great Again.”
There have been numerous protests in solidarity with U.S. demonstrators world-wide. Some 25,000 gathered in Munich June 6, while nearly as many protested across France. Tens of thousands showed up recently in Sydney and elsewhere in Australia.
In Denmark, businesses and prominent influencers posted black squares to their Instagram accounts last week, in a gesture of solidarity with protesters for racial justice in the U.S. and elsewhere. Danes said they were amazed at how quickly their online feeds were transformed.
“Most of my Instagram was darkened out,” said Astrid Aller, a University of Copenhagen student. “That kind of surprised me how many people are taking a stand.”
Her friend Clara Dalsgaard Hansen, 25, said she was distressed when she learned on Instagram about Mr. Floyd’s killing. She read social-media posts from people of color addressed to white people, telling them inaction made them complicit, and says she felt guilty over it.
She felt especially concerned as a fan of American hip-hop, feeling she had a responsibility to take action given her fondness for a genre driven by black artists.
Ms. Dalsgaard Hansen raised $850 with others in her dorm and donated it to funds that bail out arrested American protesters, after reading on social media that this was an effective way to offer support.
Bwalya Sørensen, a Danish citizen born in Zambia and a longtime activist, has headed Denmark’s chapter of Black Lives Matter since 2016, around the time she was put in touch online with activists in the U.S. Her organization focuses on concerns faced by people of color in Denmark, including Danish government detention practices of asylum seekers.
Ms. Sørensen said that she had been in touch with U.S. Black Lives Matters leaders recently, who encouraged her to make use of public interest in Mr. Floyd’s death to organize solidarity rallies, while also raising concerns important to Denmark’s black community. Her chapter helped organize thousands-strong rallies outside the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen.
Angel Tolani, who moved to Denmark from Nigeria as a teenager, says she attended a Copenhagen rally to protest what happened with Mr. Floyd but also because of her own experiences in Denmark as a black person. She said bikers have yelled racial slurs at her and bus drivers have made eye contact but not stopped for her.
Still, seeing footage of Mr. Floyd’s arrest on Twitter was a catalyst to protest.
“You’re on Twitter and the next thing you see is this man killed for nothing,” she said. She found a rally being organized on Facebook and joined in.
In other countries, support for the protests was buoyed by the idea circulating on social media that police brutality against people of color isn’t just an American problem.
Australian activists were quick to draw parallels between Mr. Floyd’s death and that of indigenous Australians like David Dungay Jr., a 26-year-old Aboriginal man, who died in a Sydney correctional facility in 2015 after being restrained by five prison guards in his cell.
Video footage aired at a subsequent coronial inquest showed Mr. Dungay telling the guards pinning him to his bed “I can’t breathe” at least 12 times. The inquest didn’t recommend disciplinary action against the guards, finding there was no malicious intent.
Images of Mr. Dungay and Mr. Floyd cropped together against a black background under the words “I can’t breathe” were shared online, with hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatterAustralia.
Mayeesha Hangan, a 27-year-old protester in Melbourne, said she felt so affected by the George Floyd video that she couldn’t bring herself to watch it all.
“I’m hoping it’s a turning point,” she said, of growing social awareness about racism. “I think it could be because it’s so global.”
Write to Jon Emont at jonathan.emont@wsj.com and Philip Wen at philip.wen@wsj.com
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