![]() ![]() The attacks were all perpetrated by white nationalists with firearms. This paper examines the different reactions on Twitter to violence targeting three religious communities: the 2015 Charleston Church shooting, the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting, and the 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings. While religious violence has always existed, the prevalence of social media has led to an increase in the magnitude of discussions around the topic. Twitter analysis through data mining, text analysis, and visualization, coupled with the application of actor-network-theory, reveals a coalition of heterogenous religious affiliations around grief and fascination. The shooting also raised the intractable problem of the internet allowing terrorists to promulgate violent content and extremist ideology with regulation in this area harder to achieve than gun control. We present this as a national case study, considering psychological and societal enablers for legislative reform in response to extreme gun violence. Within weeks, new gun control laws were introduced with bipartisan support. This was strongly modeled by political leaders. The unprecedented reluctance by the New Zealand media to feature the shooter as a protagonist or even publish his name, concentrating instead on victims and societal issues, helped promote a sense of collective responsibility for change. Psychologically, this served as a focusing event with high threat salience, shocking a country unused to gun violence despite its comparatively lax firearm legislation. In March 2019, a mass shooting at two Christchurch mosques, livestreamed to Facebook, resulted in the deaths of 51 people. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2023
Categories |