St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Jeffrey Layne Blevins: Social media lessons from #Ferguson

By telling their own stories, on their own terms, social justice advocates use social media platforms and mobile-streaming applications as a vehicle to amplify more voices and disrupt, confront or counteract traditional narratives through their own storytelling, writes Jeffrey Blevins, associate professor of journalism and head of the Department of Journalism at the University of Cincinnati.

Blevins, writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, remembers the unrest unleashed in Ferguson, Mo., in the wake of the 2014 shooting death of an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, by a white police officer. The first-hand social media stories that emerged led to Blevins' current line of research with colleagues at UC's Digital Scholarship Center, where they produced our first study that graphically illustrates how social justice groups and the public used social media to give personal meaning to the events that took place in Ferguson.

Read Blevins' op-ed here.