  The murder of George Floyd by police in May 2020 sparked international
protests and renewed attention in the Black Lives Matter movement. Here, we
characterize ways in which the online activity following George Floyd's death
was unparalleled in its volume and intensity, including setting records for
activity on Twitter, prompting the saddest day in the platform's history, and
causing George Floyd's name to appear among the ten most frequently used
phrases in a day, where he is the only individual to have ever received that
level of attention who was not known to the public earlier that same week.
Further, we find this attention extended beyond George Floyd and that more
Black victims of fatal police violence received attention following his death
than during other past moments in Black Lives Matter's history. We place that
attention within the context of prior online racial justice activism by showing
how the names of Black victims of police violence have been lifted and
memorialized over the last 12 years on Twitter. Our results suggest that the
2020 wave of attention to the Black Lives Matter movement centered past
instances of police violence in an unprecedented way, demonstrating the impact
of the movement's rhetorical strategy to "say their names."
