In May, when George Floyd, a Black man, was killed while in police custody, igniting protests across the country decrying police brutality against African Americans, the research team I lead at Cause and Social Influence was already tracking the response of young Americans to COVID-19. As spring turned into summer and the two issues merged into a nationwide movement centered around demands for racial justice, our researchers were able to observe in real time the forces that motivated individuals, nonprofits, companies, and allied causes to take action.

Indeed, it was an unprecedented opportunity for us to study how online and offline behavior feed off each other to create and drive a movement. And while we aren't claiming to show definitively that one kind of activity led to another, we were able to identify a number of patterns and connections among certain kinds of online and offline actions.

Looking more closely at the response to the virus and the protests sparked by George Floyd’s death, we noticed some commonalities:

  • The power of corporate influence.
  • Lack of trust. 
  • Social media played a larger role as an information source for racial justice activists than as a source of information about COVID-19.  
  • Young Americans are more likely to turn to celebrities and online influencers for information about racial equity than for information about COVID-19.
  • Different immediate responses. 

Read the full article about social causes online and offline by Derrick Feldmann at PhilanTopic.