‘Not With Us - Against Us’: ‘We’ vs. ‘They’ in the Transformation of Black Lives Matter Participants’ Collective Identities in Online Interactions with All Lives Matter, 2013-2014

First- and third-person plural pronouns drive the construction and transformation of collective identities in digital protest discourse. Drawing on social identity theory and discourse-analytical approaches, the research analyzes a corpus of 100,000 tweets from July 2013 to December 2014. It examines changes in the use of “we” and “they” by Black Lives Matter (BLM) participants in online discourse before and after the emergence of the counter-protest movement All Lives Matter (ALM). Using trigram-based collocation analysis with Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) scoring, the study reveals a shift from a diffuse and morally framed in-group identity in 2013 to a more consolidated and movement-specific identity in 2014. Simultaneously, the referents of “they” evolved from state institutions such as the police to include ideological opponents from civil society. These findings support the hypothesis that the emergence of counter-protests altered the discursive boundaries of opposition, resulting in a more polarized and dualistic structure of collective identity. The study contributes to scholarship on protest-counter-protest dynamics by highlighting the linguistic mechanisms through which group identities are formed, contested, and reconfigured in response to ideological confrontation.