The murder of George Floyd; his legacy in Britain and social media.

Credit: BBC/Rogan Productions/Unsplash/Parker Johnson/Colin lloyd

What happened to George Floyd five years ago was felt by millions across the world, When police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into the neck of Floyd, in Minneapolis, causing death by suffocation.

In the UK, the factors of Floyd’s murder exist in the social, racial, political and economic discourses that we all interact within our daily lives as Black-Brits; a two-way mirror, almost.

In the months leading up to George Floyd’s murder, it was recorded that Black-British people were over 9.5 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white people.

The death of Floyd sparked mass organised protests across the globe, including in Britain. These protests had massive implications on the Britain's socio-political climate that are still being felt to date.

The Edward Colston statue was toppled forcefully in Bristol due to its ties to the slave trade. In London, Black Boy Lane, an iconic street was renamed La Rose Road, after Trinidad activist John La Rose in a gesture from Haringey Council, and other streets and buildings, universities with connotations of slavery have been questioned or attempted to be erased, highlighting Britain’s racist past – despite the backlash of members of the Black community seeing the action as performative.

An alarm bell had been rung in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and it has been ringing since.

The BBC documentary Blacklash: The Murder of George Floyd remembers the events after his death: the riots, the politics, the protests and the wider implications for Britain.

In the days and weeks that followed, people were brought together despite lockdown rules and cautionary advice from the government.

Information was spread via word of mouth, and also quite effectively by social media.

Former Chief of Police Medaria ‘Rondo’ Arrandondo, who was directly involved in the trial of Derek Chauvin but is now retired, said: “Social media did not only magnify it, but it was 100 times on steroids.”

“I can’t overstate that Ms Darnella Frazier, who took that bystander video, how much it absolutely had a huge impact on the reaction, the response both in the States and around the globe.”

“It was a learning moment for me”, Rondo reflected. “I think for many public officials, we have this traditional way of not just how we receive information but also how we deliver it.”

“Most public officials in the States do a morning broadcast, a press conference, but we have to do before the five o'clock and six o’clock (news); which isn’t particularly how young people in America receive their information. Those traditional news markets are not what they are watching. They are on their phones.

“So, I had to grow in that moment in terms of learning and getting an education on how powerful social media is and the ways people are receiving their messaging particularly young people because in the summer of 2020 in the states that was a young people’s movement.”

Social media has closed the distance between audience and subject. It allowed for us to watch George Floyd’s death repeatedly, and then let us scroll down to the comments to witness the responses to the tragedy so that we feel a little less alone, and connected through our heartache and anger.

This hyper visualised not just Floyd’s death as a live testimony, but also gave the impression that the geographical distance between American and the UK felt in touching distance. 

“It was a moment that we couldn’t turn away from. It was devastating”, said Actress Nathalie Emmanuel in the BBC doc. “With the additional uncertainty of the pandemic, it was just a sense of absolute helplessness. In our homes, our windows to the world was our phones and our screens.”

Social media was also used to organise the mass protests themselves in different UK cities, creating community, and providing a space for a sort of DIY youth culture.

A protest in central London on 31 May 2020 touched historical places in the Capital, such as Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park. People weren’t just marching, the documentary shows calls of “no justice, no peace” from the protesters, placards and cardboard signs with ‘I can’t breathe’ scribbled in black marker.

Megaphones were raised as people expressed their pain and anger, but also to galvanise and instruct mass demonstrations in Birmingham, Merseyside, Manchester, Nottingham and Leeds to name a few. Digital communities coming together in the physical.

Social media connected us, whilst fashioning a new role for itself in protest and activism, militarisation and organisation.

Speaking on this, activist Khady Gueye, who organised a  Gloucestershire BLM (Black Lives Matter) protest in 2022, said “2020 was a crazy time in the world, right? I mean, we were all living in a completely new world to what we had known because everything was online. We shifted from a physical community to a digital one.”

“Social media has been around for ages, and we weren’t unfamiliar with those online spaces, but our main and only source of information was really online because you weren’t seeing people in real life.”

“We felt really inspired and wanted to show solidarity with the movement in 2020, and social media became the vehicle for all that. Primarily, for us, it was Facebook."

After creating a Facebook group and then an event, Gueye didn’t realise how much traction the event would get.

“I think we were really naive. It’s probably because until then”, she said. “I never experienced how quickly social media traction can pick up before that moment and how much it can get out of control.

“I thought that we would have 50 people and it would be like-minded people that we know and are already existing in my echo chamber, but I never expected to go from that to almost a thousand people who were engaging with the posts we were putting out on our Facebook page.”

Actor John Boyega tweeted at the time: “George Floyd. So heartbreaking to hear about the continuous cycle of violence aimed at black people by racist cops. Murder Charges Only.”

Before going viral at an international level on social media after being recorded doing an emotional speech at the Hyde Park protest, he used his platform to not just highlight the BLM movement in America but also issues going on in the UK.

“Quite quickly, it became a social media event. Something for people to jump on” remarks Miquita Oliver in the doc.

Another thing that came out of this was the black square.

A trend where Instagram users would post a square on their story in solidarity. A form of protest in itself, this has since been adopted for other causes such as the NHS, when there were reports of it being defunded.

“Black Square Tuesday was sort of performative, tokenistic activism, and it did become a trend, which I think is fair enough to say that”, Gueye unpacks. “Part of it, I think, were some people, appeasing their guilt.”

However, Gueye also says on reflection,“you could say, it has bolstered the awareness of the BLM upsurgence in 2020 but I don’t particularly feel that it was in a positive way.”

Social media also became a breeding ground for racial toxicity.

“I think there were some elements where it was really brilliant in bringing people together and allowing people to interact, but it also became a breeding ground for, in particular to BLM and this film, it created space to really embolden this over racist retrig which was already existing in these spaces”, explains Gueye.

“It’s because they are not facing repercussions from seeing people walking down the street; it has given a lot of people freedom that they probably hadn’t before.”

An incident that this relates to is one that is documented in the film, where Tommy Robinson, is using a platform to promote right-wing views as counter culture, with the English Defence League, who incite violence and conflict during a protest in London.

“I think it really forced all of us to look at our lives and experiences and the people around us in a different way”, Gueye said. “For me, it made me question the world I knew, where I grew up and the people I grew up around.”

Speaking lastly on Floyd’s death, Gueye summarised, “This isn’t the first time we have seen this violence towards a Black person, or a person of colour.” 

“It’s a recurring cycle that we see all the time through history. I think it’s a trauma that Black people are used to, but I feel as if this played out in a very different way than before. Maybe because the use of social media was exacerbating it at that moment?"

“To see it in the way we did, in the volume that we did across the news and across social media, where everywhere you looked, is video of a man being murdered, is something that I certainly haven’t experienced before."

“It felt slightly different in how we felt that trauma because we couldn't escape it, and we were confronted with it every minute of every day.”

Chauvin was charged with third-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter and second-degree unintentional murder and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison.

Backlash: The Murder of George Floyd is available to watch on BBC iPlayer now.