The #BlackLivesMatter has been trending on Twitter following condemnation of West Ham’s Kurt Zouma who reportedly lost Adidas deal after a video emerged of him dropping, kicking and slapping a cat.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) swiftly rebuked the “very upsetting” video after it surfaced online and will be leading the investigation while co-operating with Essex Police.
More than 225,000 people have signed an online petition on Change.org, started by Anti Animal Abuse, calling for Zouma to be prosecuted amid a growing public backlash.
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Reacting, Nigerians took to the microblogging platform on Thursday while calling out Adidas “for being racist” saying “BlackLivesMatter” and “all humans should be treated equally irrespective of their colour or gender”.
See some tweets gathered below;
George Floyd’s death
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was murdered in the US city of Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, a 44-year-old white police officer. Floyd had been arrested on suspicion of using a counterfeit $20 bill.
His death sparked reactions on Twitter, generating nearly 8.8 million tweets containing the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag – making this the highest number of uses for this hashtag in a single day, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of publicly available tweets.
‘Black Lives Matter’
The phrase “black lives matter” first gained attention after it was used by a black community organiser in a Facebook post following the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida.
Previous Center analyses of the hashtag show that its use and its influence grew to national prominence after Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown in 2014 but was not indicted in the death of the black teen in November of that year.
