Aim of the study

Different types of physical and online actions appeared in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire. People from local and wider communities gathered together and supported Grenfell Tower fire victims and bereaved families for material needs and justice seeking actions. However, there were also small numbers of hostile comments in the social media that blamed victims and justice seeking action of survivors, especially, in racist ways. Therefore, in order to understand how racist tweeters used language to attack victims of the Grenfell Tower fire, we collected 416 racist tweets from Twitter and used critical discursive psychological approach to understand what was said, how it was said, and how it functioned. 

Tweets were also analysed which were in themselves not using racist language, but where replies included racist language. This dataset represents 267 of the 416 tweets that were analysed. Because of the ethical considerations only the tweets that used specific hashtags were made available. Therefore, even though we found 416 racist tweets, we made 267 of them publicly available. 

Description of data

These four files involves tweet ID numbers of racist Twitter posts against Grenfell Tower victims, survivors and bereaved families. In total we collected 26,653 tweets that involved #Grenfell #GrenfellTower #GrenfellTowerfire hashtags in four different time periods (see below for more information). Later, we separated the ones that used hostile and racist language against Grenfell Tower fire victims and bereaved families. We only made the data that we analysed available in these four documents.

1. The document named Ô2017_Tweets_Grenfelll Public Inquiry beganÕ  involves data that were collected between September 7 and 21 in 2017. This centred on the formal opening of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry on 14th September 2017. We collected 104 racist tweets out of 6,348 Grenfell Tower fire-related tweets from this period. However, we made 93 of the tweets, that used hashtags, available in this data set. The final 13 TweetIDs in this file represent Tweets which were in themselves not using racist language, but where replies included racist language.

2. The document named Ô2018_Tweets_PetitionÕ involves tweets from the second data collection time period that was during the time of the petition that Grenfell supporters created to demand a debate in Parliament to include survivors and bereaved families in the inquiry process. The petition began on 14th May 2018 and it ended on 30th May 2018. We collected 224 racist tweets out of 7,578 Grenfell Tower fire-related tweets between those dates. However, we made 112 of those tweets, that used hashtags, available in this data set. The final 22 TweetIDs in this file represent Tweets which were in themselves not using racist language, but where replies included racist language.


3. The document named Ô2019_Tweets_Inquiry ReportÕ has tweets that were collected between 23rd October and 7th November in 2019. This included the date of the first inquiry report on 30th October. We collected 55 racist tweets out of 11,718 Grenfell Tower fire-related tweets during this period. However, we made 47 of those tweets, that used hashtags, available in this data set. The final 6 TweetIDs in this file represent Tweets which were in themselves not using racist language, but where replies included racist language.


4. The document named Ô2020_Tweets_COVID cancelled SWÕ  involves the last data collection time period that happened between 7th and 31st March 2020. This included the first Silent Walk that was cancelled because of the COVID-19 outbreak. We collected 33 tweets racist tweets out of 1,010 Grenfell Tower fire-related tweets. However, we made 13 of those tweets, that used hashtags, available in this data set. The final 10TweetIDs in this file represent Tweets which were in themselves not using racist language, but where replies included racist language.


The files include TweetIDs as captured in January 2021. These can be rehydrated using resources such as Twarc (https://github.com/DocNow/twarc) or Hydrator (https://github.com/DocNow/hydrator) in order to retrieve the Tweets as they currently appear on Twitter. Tweets which have been deleted since data capture will not be retrieved.