00:01Americans may never fully understand why this event became such a flashpoint.
00:05This morning a local 18-year-old is shot and killed by...
00:08...the youngster did not have a weapon and the shooting was not justified.
00:13How this particular confluence of violence, systemic despair, and social media turned a moment into a movement.
00:19You've got issues in this city!
00:21Maybe it was the image of his lifeless body as it lay in the summer heat.
00:25Dead body, live from Ferguson, they just killed this for no reason.
00:29Maybe it was just time.
00:31Race as a whole is something that's always simmering on Twitter.
00:37In the 15 months that we analyzed, there were nearly 1 billion tweets about race.
00:43And that comes out to be about 2.1 million tweets a day.
00:48But the facts are clear.
00:49Black Lives Matter has morphed from an anguished, tweeted cry into an unprecedented social action.
00:55And conversation about race, violence, gender, and inequity.
00:59I believe August 9th changed things for this entire country.
01:04What people witnessed was a reminder that oppressed people will not be oppressed forever.
01:09We lost a young man, Michael Brown.
01:12In our analysis, we found that the hashtag Black Lives Matter didn't really gain that kind of prevalence that it has today until the shooting death of Michael Brown and Ferguson.
01:26So, when we look back in the latter half of 2013, the Black Lives Matter hashtag was only used about 5,000 times.
01:36After the shooting of Michael Brown, the number of tweets using the hashtag actually went up to almost 60,000 a day in the three weeks following his death.
01:47Ferguson and Black Lives Matter are, to date, the most used hashtags on Twitter.
02:00It occurred right in the middle of an apartment complex.
02:02And it was fairly early still.
02:04You're talking about an apartment complex that holds 1,000 people.
02:08Immediately, a crowd gathered.
02:11And to see him continue to be in the street while the investigation occurred was, I think, shocking to a lot of people.
02:19You know, from there, it continued to spiral out of control.
02:22Even that day, trying to get Mr. Brown, get attention to Mr. Brown and get the coroners to Mr. Brown, it continued to spiral out of control.
02:31Twitter followed that unmanageable spiral.
02:34Within 24 hours of Brown's death, over 146,000 tweets were posted about the incident.
02:41It was recorded and it went on Facebook.
02:44And that's where, within the 48 to 72 hours, the incident became a phenomenon.
02:52It was amazing to see what people knew or thought they knew.
02:56But the amount of information that was out there in the media, from people on the scene, from people tweeting, from things that were getting replayed, compared to what I knew as the mayor.
03:09Michael Brown died on Saturday.
03:11By Wednesday, the town had turned into a war zone.
03:16Between 8 p.m. and midnight, there was an average of 4,500 tweets per minute about the events in Ferguson.
03:23Within a week, Twitter users generated almost 11 million tweets about Ferguson.
03:28All eyes were on this small St. Louis suburb most of the world hadn't ever heard of.
03:35Ferguson is so small.
03:38Ferguson has 21,000 residents, 67% African American.
03:45And at that time, there was one elected official on the council.
03:51Ferguson lacked personnel and experience for dealing with the wave of reporters that parachuted in.
03:56There were several impromptu press conferences that were taking place.
04:01And it caused the city to be criticized because the city was not able to give the accurate information that they were looking for.
04:10But there are conflicting reports about what led up to the shooting.
04:13If the city did not give the information, someone with social media gave the information.
04:19And they were on the scene reporting.
04:21We're not sure who's adjourned us and who's not.
04:24And you were playing catch up.
04:26Time after time, I'd see a picture online that would say, you know, Ferguson cop with a machine gun and a tank.
04:33It's not a Ferguson cop. There's no Ferguson cops there.
04:36They haven't been there since August 9th.
04:39That's very difficult to deal with from a PR standpoint.
04:44Trying to get your citizens to understand that, number one.
04:48But then also trying to get that message out to the broader community.
04:53Simmering in the background was the hashtag Black Lives Matter.
04:57Born in July 2012, in the wake of George Zimmerman's acquittal in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin,
05:03it began when community organizer Alicia Garza posted an anguished note on Facebook.
05:08Black people, I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.
05:13Her friend and fellow activist Patrice Cullors amplified Garza's thoughts, adding her own, along with the hashtag Black Lives Matter.
05:22But the hashtag was slow to gain traction.
05:25The month before Brown's shooting, it was used only 398 times.
05:30But in the roughly three weeks following his death, it appeared an average of 60,000 times a day on Twitter.
05:37Then the full force of the Black Lives Matter movement was unleashed on November 25th, 2014.
05:44And later that afternoon, we received word that there would be, that the prosecutor would be holding a press conference at 8 p.m. that evening.
05:57The grand jury deliberated over two days, making their final decision.
06:03They determined that no probable cause exists to file any charge against Officer Wilson.
06:09Within 30 minutes or so, that's when unrest began.
06:14This process is broken. We object publicly and loudly.
06:20That day, the hashtag was used almost 173,000 times.
06:25Ferguson was really kind of a, in terms of its use on Twitter, really spiked, really kind of a launching pad for people to engage more with that hashtag.
06:36And it became a real consistent presence on Twitter since then.
06:41This particular incident, it allowed the community and it allowed African Americans, our residents, to be able to say, I need to get involved.
06:53And it's a continual conversation at times that we don't have a need to have about how we deal with some of these disparities.
07:00That's what people saw. They saw people standing up, not just in the name of Michael Brown, but in the name of Trayvon Martin and of Eric Garner.
07:07And they saw us stand up for days and days and days after that to ensure that this conversation about our humanity does not, is not an optional one, but is a required one.
07:19Three years later, while the movement has grown and changed, the call to action has remained relevant.
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