Progress and push-back: How the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd impacted public discourse on race and racism on Twitter

This study examined whether killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor by current or former law enforcement officers in 2020 were followed by shifts in public sentiment toward Black people. Methods: Google searches for the names “Ahmaud Arbery,” “Breonna Taylor,” and “George Floyd” were obtained from the Google Health Application Programming Interface (API). Using the Twitter API, we collected a 1% random sample of publicly available U.S. race-related tweets from November 2019–September 2020 (N = 3,380,616). Sentiment analysis was performed using Support Vector Machines, a supervised machine learning model. A qualitative content analysis was conducted on a random sample of 3,000 tweets to understand themes in discussions of race and racism and inform interpretation of the quantitative trends. Results: The highest rate of Google searches for any of the three names was for George Floyd during the week of May 31 to June 6, the week after his murder. The percent of tweets referencing Black people that were negative decreased by 32% (from 49.33% in November 4–9 to 33.66% in June 1–7) (p