As Blackout Tuesday posts fill Instagram feeds, many say they are drowning out vital information shared under the BLM and BlackLivesMatter hashtags
We have mixed feelings about #BlackoutTuesday, too. Benjamin Mayo / 9to5Mac : Apple Music joins wider music industry Black Out Tuesday awareness campaign with app takeover The Verge : Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and Amazon unite in support of Blackout Tuesday Jem Aswad / Variety : K-Pop Fans Take Over #whitelivesmatter Hashtag, Drown Out Racist Posts Joe Coscarelli / New York Times : BlackoutTuesday: A Music Industry Protest Becomes a Social Media Moment Tirhakah Love / OneZero : The Emptiness of Blackout Tuesday The Hustle : Blackout Tuesday's strange day Chuck Arnold / New York Post : Artists support ‘Black Out Tuesday’ amid widespread protests Mariah Haas / Fox News : Music industry holding ‘Black Out Tuesday’ in response to George Floyd's death Anne Steele / Wall Street Journal : Music Labels Suspend Work on ‘Blackout Tuesday’ in Support of George Floyd Demonstrations Mark Savage / BBC : George Floyd death: TV, radio and music industries mark ‘Blackout Tuesday’ Tweets: @mosseri : We're hearing asks from the community that posts related to Blackout Tuesday use the hashtag #blackouttuesday, and not #blacklivesmatter. The #blacklivesmatter hashtag aggregates important information and resources for the community. @jeannakadlec : my instagram feed this morning is just a wall of white people posting black screens. like... that isn't muting yourself, babe, that's actually kind of the opposite! it's taking up an absolutely WILD amount of space and does nothing! a few thoughts on this: @cnn : “We know that's it no intent to harm but to be frank, this essentially does harm the message,” mental health advocate and Black Lives Matter activist Kenidra Woods wrote. “We use hashtag to keep ppl updated. PLS stop using the hashtag for black images!!” https://www.cnn.com/... Peppermint / @peppermint247 : Let's Post something more informative than symbolic on #BlackOutTuesday https://www.cnn.com/... @han_spinel : A solution for my white friends: please just support your black friends every single day. https://twitter.com/... @mosseri : You can choose to edit your post caption to remove the #blacklivesmatter hashtag and your post will no longer be shown on that hashtag page. In some cases, it may take up to 10 minutes for the post to be removed once you edit it. Joanna Stern / @joannastern : What a good day for Instagram advertisers. No better way to see all those ads than against a backdrop of black squares. Mike Wilner / @wilnerness590 : Please don't post a black square with the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag (not sure if this only applies to Instagram but I thought I'd help spread the word). https://twitter.com/... Babu Prit / @runwithskizzers : Don't use the BLM hashtag if you're participating in the #theshowmustbepaused https://twitter.com/... Dan Moren / @dmoren : Lots of people on my timeline posting blackout images under the Black Lives Matter hashtag, but that may actually be causing more harm than doing good. https://twitter.com/... Joanna Stern / @joannastern : Go back and change your hashtag. https://twitter.com/... LL McKinney / @elleonwords : This is what performative allyship does. This is what happens when you're not really plugged in. When you use Black pain and a Black movement as a photo op. When you don't actually care. You're erasing us. You're. Erasing. Us. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Blackout Tuesday began as a music-industry protest — with Spotify and Apple Music joining a coordinated black-out of their apps — before spilling into a mass Instagram posting moment. The unintended consequence: millions of near-identical black-square posts tagged #BlackLivesMatter are crowding out the mutual-aid updates, bail-fund links, and protester information that the hashtag exists to aggregate, prompting Instagram's Adam Mosseri to ask posters to drop the tag.
First-order effects
- Activists and organizers lose their primary discovery channel right when they need it most: resources, safety information, and fundraising appeals posted under #BLM and #BlackLivesMatter get buried beneath solidarity posts that carry none.
- Instagram has to intervene in real time — Mosseri publicly advising users to remove the hashtag from blackout posts — turning a passive feed algorithm into an active referee of a protest format.
Second-order effects
- Platforms' content-moderation systems are exposed again: as Facebook admitted in 2019, automated systems struggle to distinguish anti-racist advocacy from attacks on protected groups, so they cannot cleanly separate signal from noise here either.
- Counter-tactics escalate on both sides: supporters have since refined hashtag-hijacking and DMCA-complaint tactics to protect protesters and drown out racist rhetoric, showing hashtag warfare becoming bidirectional rather than accidental.
Third-order effects
- If one well-meaning mass post can neutralize a movement's core hashtag overnight, organizers will treat hashtags as fragile shared infrastructure — fragmenting across multiple tags, off-platform channels, or moderated lists instead of relying on any single public tag.
- The episode pushes platforms toward explicit governance of collective-expression formats: deciding which posts amplify, which aggregate, and which crowd out — decisions previously left to organic feed dynamics.
The trend: Protest hashtags are functioning as contested public infrastructure whose viability now depends on both platform moderation choices and the posting behavior of millions of participants.