Can Google Trends explain $43 billion in corporate commitments to racial equity?
Hey folks. This is the 2nd edition of The Great Near. Today’s post is about how Google Trends can shed light on public interest in racial equity and explain last year’s upsurge in philanthropy.
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In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the summer protests, corporations made pledges to advance racial equity totaling over $43 billion (tracked by Common Future). Microsoft, for example, promised to create a $50 million investment fund focused on Black-owned businesses. Twitter committed $100 million to invest in CDFIs through their Finance Justice Fund.
Not only is this level of giving unprecedented (a survey of companies with median revenues of $28 billion found that 61% exceeded their 2020 budgets) but it raises questions about the power we’ve ceded to corporations, the tech sector specifically, to make the right decisions to fix our problems.
Not to mention, many of these commitments are just pledges. We don’t actually know how much money reached the people it intends to serve.
The wealth gap has already threatened our fragile democracy, and encouraging these actions that sit somewhere between philanthropy and PR sidelines our government from bearing final responsibility. When we applaud short-term charitable giving over public reform, we cede our power to ensure dollars are spread equitably across communities and to hold companies accountable for how they made that money in the first place.
Take Amazon. Jeff Bezos could have given every one of his (former) 876,000 employees a $105,000 bonus during the pandemic and he still would have been as rich as the first day of March lockdown. But few people are talking about tax reform and antitrust loopholes that might have ensured an equitable distribution of Amazon wages in the first place. Instead, we’re celebrating Bezos for making the single-largest charitable donation in 2020: a $10 billion gift to fight climate change.
The true cost of every giving campaign last year—Black lives lost at the hands of police—was often obscured by similar fanfare. Should we blame companies? The press releases, ad campaigns, and public apologies served to pacify consumers demanding sweeping change.
This made me wonder: if public attention wanes, what happens to the money? In this time of unprecedented interest in racial equity, we can use Google Trends to understand patterns and reveal the depth of our commitments to change.
Google Trends & BLM
(‘Black Lives Matter’ search interest from Jan 2011-Jan 2021. It spikes in June 2020 and is followed by a precipitous drop.)
Researchers have mined search queries using Google Trends since 2012, using it to predict illnesses before they spread and foresee losses in financial markets.
With near real-time data of what people are (or aren’t) searching, we can keep our finger on the pulse of real-time public interest. Polls and social media are all subject to the very human tendency to lie about the things that make us uncomfortable, but Trends can reveal what’s under the surface.
Studies like those above suggest that information-seeking behavior can also be used to predict real-world events. (Some researchers have disputed this for reliability based on the frequency of search terms, so take this with a grain of salt.) I looked at a few search terms related to race and economic equity to understand public interest over the past decade. Specifically, what happened in June 2020. (Note that Google uses a relative index, so 100 is the maximum interest over a given timeframe.)
(‘Racial wealth gap’ search interest from Jan 2011-Jan 2021.)
Unsurprisingly, popularity spikes around the time of George Floyd’s murder and subsequent protests. Terms that are more common in the national lexicon (“racism” and “racial justice”) displayed the same patterns.
This pattern also presents with “support black businesses” and “black owned banks near me,” which are terms that someone might search to take immediate action. This is encouraging! It suggests that we reacted to the events of June 2020 by trying to play our part.
Why did public opinion shift so dramatically last June as compared to the moments after every other, equally public murder at the hands of police? What does it say about our country to realize how little we were moved by the deaths of Freddie Gray or Michael Brown?
Perhaps this data suggests a national reckoning around whiteness that has only recently superseded our outrage. While search behavior only implies intent, a spike in searches for “white privilege” or “white supremacy” might reveal a deeper exploration of race in America. Note the graph below.
(“White privilege” and “white supremacy” search interest from Jan 2011-Jan 2021. The first spike is in Aug 2017, around the time of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally.)
Still, this isn’t the full picture. These graphs only reveal that there was significantly more interest relative to a given term’s past search history. Trends doesn’t offer raw search query data, so we can only approximate search volume by placing each term in context. “Taylor Swift” is often used as a benchmark in these analyses given our shared understanding of her popularity.
(Search popularity of terms from Jan 2011-Jan 2021.)
“Black Lives Matter” searches in June 2020 (yellow) nearly reached the volume of searches for “Taylor Swift (blue) at the height of her popularity in 2014. Searches for “racism” (red) registered at nearly half this amount.
For a brief moment, our collective pursuit of justice for People of Color exceeded our craving for Taylor Swift news.
We can go one step further by breaking down interest geographically. Below are two charts comparing subregional interest in “black lives matter” to “support black businesses” over the same period.
Search volume aside, “Black Lives Matter” was most popular in conservative states (using the 2020 presidential election as a benchmark) while “support black businesses” was most popular in progressive states. (Google Trends are normalized, so these states had the highest search interest in proportion to their population.)
This reminded me that Trends only offers information-seeking behavior. While we might assume the intent behind a search for “support black businesses,” I imagine that “black lives matter,” might be searched as a question in some places, and a statement in others.
Perhaps this is a bold claim, but it’s not unsupported by the data around regional support for the Black Lives Matter movement. At first glance, the data suggests a rising consciousness around race, but questioning the context of who is doing the searching may reveal more insidious trends.
Getting back to the point.
Black squares aside, these digital trends mattered in the real world. What we yell about on Twitter (like challenging companies to do better) shifted real money to underserved communities and BIPOC-owned small businesses struggling to survive this pandemic.
Problems that are systemic and structural can only be fixed by a solution that is systemic and structural.
Don’t get me wrong, corporations have a role to play. For starters, corporate PACs should stop fueling political campaigns grounded in climate denial and voter suppression. Citigroup, for example, put out statements last year in favor of diversity and inclusion, which doesn’t acknowledge $242,000 in donations they made to members of Congress who are rated "F" by the NAACP. As Emily Atkin of HEATED explains, Microsoft’s recent adjustments to their political giving policy suggest that “big corporations—which have historically shunned litmus tests for political giving—can admit that some lies are simply too big and dangerous to support.”
So yes, let’s keep holding companies accountable—to expanding DEI initiatives, giving to nonprofits advancing racial equity, and questioning every political contribution that entrenches the status quo.
I welcome every company to double or triple any of last year’s commitments to racial justice, regardless of what’s trending. While these dollars are a very good thing for under-resourced organizations doing this work, we cannot wager racial justice on philanthropy that rises and falls with public outrage around every tragedy.
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What’s Up This Week? 👀 ✨
Caught my attention
Yelp’s Chief Diversity Officer, Miriam Warren writes in Fast Company that companies should think outside of giving budgets to better support Black-owned businesses: “Last summer, tech companies across Silicon Valley were inspired by Netflix’s move to support Black banks. In the weeks that followed, other companies moved quickly to determine how they could also meaningfully support the Black community. At Yelp, we allocated $10 million of our cash holdings into three certified Community Development Financial Institutions. Twitter committed 1% of its holdings to combat racial justice. For its part, PayPal invested in Black- and Latino-led venture funds.”
A deep dive
Boston Ujima Fund — the first democratically-managed investment fund — released their first investor report. Read this to learn about their first investments, what they’re learning, and what comes next.
Someone you should know about
You should know about Erika Seth Davies! Erika is a Social Entrepreneur in Residence at Common Future, Founder of The REAL, and the leading voice that is shaking up investment management and demanding asset owners shift more of their dollars to BIPOC asset managers.
until next time,
-Caitlin