Editorial

Social media plays into hands of those who seek attention

Thursday, August 11, 2016

"He'd like us to mention his name," the late radio commentator Paul Harvey used to say, while reporting on someone who committed a mass murder or some other atrocity in an effort to gain notoriety.

"We won't" was always his next sentence.

The attraction of fame for warped minds has only grown stronger with the growth of social media in the years since Harvey's death.

"Media contagion" is what two researchers, Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy, called it while presenting the findings on previous research about gun massacres and the lure of fame.

They used a 2015 study that studied 57 billion tweets, of which 72 million included the word "shooting" and 2 million that included the words "mass murder" or "school shooting."

Not surprisingly, they found that the more tweets that occur about a mass shooting, the higher the chances are that another gun massacre will occur soon after.

Looking at numerous studies, they found that the perpetrator of mass shootings usually "desired fame and wished to emulate a previous mass shooter." The number of mass shootings climbed from two or three per year in 2000, to 20 such incidents in 2015.

That's a three-fold increase over 15 years, about the same time social media such as Twitter exploded.

"We would argue identification with prior mass shooters made famous by extensive media coverage, including names, faces, writings and detailed accounts of their lives and backgrounds, is a more powerful push toward violence than mental health status or even access to guns," the authors write in their presentation paper.

It's easy to blame "the media" for drawing too much attention to perpetrators of horrible crimes.

But what is "the media" in 2016? Anyone with a laptop and a Twitter account has the potential to start a viral post that carries as much weight as a major network.

On the political front, the campaign of Donald Trump proves the impact of social media -- he has yet to spend a dime on television advertising for the general election, preferring instead to launch a storm of tweets in response to any situation.

Hillary Clinton supporters would delight in seeing a comparison drawn between mass shooters and her opponent, especially in light of his flippant remarks concerning the Second Amendment, but that's going too far.

It's clear in this age of easy access to mass audiences, however, that Paul Harvey had a point.

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