In their new article, “Waves of Attention to Racial Injustice on Social Media: Extrajudicial Police Killings in the United States as Focusing Events,” Annie Waldherr, Nicola Righetti, Ryan J. Gallagher, Kira Klinger, Daniela Stoltenberg, Sagar Kumar, Dominic Ridley, and Brooke Foucault Welles explore why some instances of police violence capture significant attention on social media while others do not. Using a dataset of over 1.5 million tweets related to 795 extrajudicial police killings in the U.S. between 2015 and 2016, the study analyzes which factors contribute to public attention on Twitter/X.

The study conceptualises and distinguishes between two interconnected processes that shape public attention:

• Thresholding – determining which victims are talked about at all. Victims who are Black, female, very young, unarmed, or did not clearly threaten the police are significantly more likely to receive attention.

• Focusing – determining the intensity of attention. Stronger waves of engagement occur when the first tweets happen on Fridays, when incidents take place in medium-to-large cities, and when elite accounts (such as media and activists) amplify the case early. A “Goldilocks effect” was also observed: moderate use of hashtags and visuals increases attention, but excessive use can reduce it.

The publication is the result of a transatlantic collaboration between scholars from five institutions across Europe and the United States.

Read the full article here: doi.org/10.1177/08944393251364290

Cite the article:

Waldherr, A., Righetti, N., Gallagher, R. J., Klinger, K., Stoltenberg, D., Kumar, S., Ridley, D., & Foucault Welles, B. (2025). Waves of Attention to Racial Injustice on Social Media: Extrajudicial Police Killings in the United States as Focusing Events. Social Science Computer Review, 0(0). doi.org/10.1177/08944393251364290