Are Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and other social platforms to blame for the rise in mass shootings?
Investigates ı By Jeff Watterson
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The coverage of Parkland through social media started shortly after the shooting began. Content ranging from Snapchat videos to emotional posts for help were released and shared on multiple platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Students captured the incident on their own phones, including videos of them shielding themselves and areas in the classroom that were damaged from the shots. Students were using Facebook and Twitter specifically to determine if certain friends or family members were still alive, a few posts received thousands of shares from the public. Even during the attack, students still sent tweets. One student stated, “my school is being shot up and I am locked inside” (Shayanian, 2018).
The Parkland coverage on social media did not end there. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students called out lawmakers and created a plan for action. The most popular social media platforms became flooded with photos and videos of protesting students, Emma González, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, and Sarah Chadwick. These students used social media to voice their opinion, call out lawmakers, and spread awareness about gun control. Twitter rapidly verified the accounts of these four students to support their credibility of their information (Wagner, 2018).
Coverage of the shooting progressed with the creation of the #NeverAgain movement and the March For Our Lives demonstration. With this movement and demonstration, students aimed to end gun violence and organized a march in Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2018. All major news organizations reported on the march throughout the day and even celebrities such as Oprah, Miley Cyrus, and Taylor Swift showed their support through social media and monetary donations (Amatulli, 2018).
The extensive media coverage of the Parkland shooting represented a more-developed media era. Much of the coverage surrounding this shooting took place in digital space, with postings on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, and Instagram. The natural reaction of students to immediately take phones out and post on social media demonstrated just how much of a role the digital space had in the coverage of this crisis situation in 2018. Unlike the media coverage from Columbine and Virginia Tech, the media coverage of Parkland sparked a global conversation and nationally recognized campaigns. This may be attributed to the social media era and its impact as a communication channel.
Mother Jones Archive
It is evident just how much of an effect the evolution of digital platforms and social media has had on how news of these shootings is disseminated. It is also key to analyze how these findings relate to contagion by looking at the frequency of incidents throughout the media eras. As stated within the methodology, the year of 2011 may be used as a benchmark, due to the surge of social media milestones that year. The mass shooting archive analyzed in this study was provided by Harvard researchers through Mother Jones (Cohen, Azrael, & Miller, 2014). The data provides specific information, including an entire record of mass shootings from 1982 to 2018. The archive also provides information on the location of shootings, what year shootings took place, a brief summary of incidents, a count of fatalities and injuries, and other details on weapons used and mental health involvement.
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