Mental Illness, the Media, and the Moral Politics of Mass Violence

Duxbury, Scott W.; Frizzell, Laura C.; Lindsay, Sadé L.

doi:10.1177/0022427818787225

Cited by 58 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 55 publications

(134 reference statements)

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“…This study is not immune from limitations. First, previous traditional media research efforts have shown significant bias in mass shooting media coverage based on event factors such as the race/ethnicity of both the shooter and the victims, as well as the number of associated casualties (Duxbury et al, 2018;Schildkraut et al, 2018). Guggenheim et al (2015) described the reciprocal relationship between traditional and social media discussing mass shooting events and we can assume the transference of this coverage bias.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bots fired: examining social bot evidence in online mass shooting conversations

et al. 2019

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Mass shootings, like other extreme events, have long garnered public curiosity and, in turn, significant media coverage. The media framing, or topic focus, of mass shooting events typically evolves over time from details of the actual shooting to discussions of potential policy changes (e.g., gun control, mental health). Such media coverage has been historically provided through traditional media sources such as print, television, and radio, but the advent of online social networks (OSNs) has introduced a new platform for accessing, producing, and distributing information about such extreme events. The ease and convenience of OSN usage for information within society's larger growing reliance upon digital technologies introduces potential unforeseen risks. Social bots, or automated software agents, are one such risk, as they can serve to amplify or distort potential narratives associated with extreme events such as mass shootings. In this paper, we seek to determine the prevalence and relative importance of social bots participating in OSN conversations following mass shooting events using an ensemble of quantitative techniques. Specifically, we examine a corpus of more than 46 million tweets produced by 11.7 million unique Twitter accounts within OSN conversations discussing four major mass shooting events: the 2017 Las Vegas concert shooting, the 2017 Sutherland Springs church chooting, the 2018 Parkland School Shooting and the 2018 Santa Fe school shooting. This study's results show that social bots participate in and contribute to online mass shooting conversations in a manner that is distinguishable from human contributions. Furthermore, while social bots accounted for fewer than 1% of total corpus user contributors, social network analysis centrality measures identified many bots with significant prominence in the conversation networks, densely occupying many of the highest eigenvector and out-degree centrality measure rankings, to include 82% of the top-100 eigenvector values of the Las Vegas retweet network.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bots fired: examining social bot evidence in online mass shooting conversations

et al. 2019

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“…Implicit or explicit racial biases can be central in people's understanding of social arXiv:1904.01596v2 [cs.CL] 4 Apr 2019 problems (Drakulich, 2015); in the mass shooting context, race is a factor in an event's newsworthiness (Schildkraut et al, 2018) and is often mentioned prominently in media coverage, particularly when the shooter is non-white (Mingus and Zopf, 2010;Park et al, 2012). Duxbury et al (2018) find that media representations of white shooters disproportionately divert blame by framing them as mentally ill while representations of non-white shooters are more frequently criminalized, highlighting histories of violent behavior.…”

Section: The Role Of the Shooter's Racementioning

confidence: 88%

Analyzing Polarization in Social Media: Method and Application to Tweets on 21 Mass Shootings

Demszky

Garg

Voigt³

et al. 2019

Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North

124

103

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We provide an NLP framework to uncover four linguistic dimensions of political polarization in social media: topic choice, framing, affect and illocutionary force. We quantify these aspects with existing lexical methods, and propose clustering of tweet embeddings as a means to identify salient topics for analysis across events; human evaluations show that our approach generates more cohesive topics than traditional LDA-based models. We apply our methods to study 4.4M tweets on 21 mass shootings. We provide evidence that the discussion of these events is highly polarized politically and that this polarization is primarily driven by partisan differences in framing rather than topic choice. We identify framing devices, such as grounding and the contrasting use of the terms "terrorist" and "crazy", that contribute to polarization. Results pertaining to topic choice, affect and illocutionary force suggest that Republicans focus more on the shooter and event-specific facts (news) while Democrats focus more on the victims and call for policy changes. Our work contributes to a deeper understanding of the way group divisions manifest in language and to computational methods for studying them. 1

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“…A content analysis of news documents covering mass shootings from 2013 to 2015 found that white and Latinx male perpetrators were more likely to have their crimes attributed to mental illness than were shootings by black men. 41 White men were qualitatively described as more sympathetic characters than black and Latinx men, who were more often labeled as violent threats to public safety. 41 Despite the popular stereotype of mass shooters being white, statistically just over half (57%) of the perpetrators of FBI-defined mass shootings since the early 1980s have been white, and the majority of victims of mass shootings in recent years have been nonwhite individuals.…”

Section: An Agenda For Mental Health Research Into Mass Shootings Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 41 White men were qualitatively described as more sympathetic characters than black and Latinx men, who were more often labeled as violent threats to public safety. 41 Despite the popular stereotype of mass shooters being white, statistically just over half (57%) of the perpetrators of FBI-defined mass shootings since the early 1980s have been white, and the majority of victims of mass shootings in recent years have been nonwhite individuals. 42 , 43 When a mass shooting occurs and the identified perpetrator is black, content analysis shows that politicians’ press briefings, media reports, and research articles rarely mention mental health and illness in descriptions of the perpetrator.…”

Section: An Agenda For Mental Health Research Into Mass Shootings Andmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Future of Psychiatric Research into American Gun Violence

Metzl

Piemonte

McKay

2021

Harv Rev Psychiatry

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This article outlines a four-part strategy for future research in mental health and complementary disciplines that will broaden understanding of mass shootings and multi-victim gun homicides. First, researchers must abandon the starting assumption that acts of mass violence are driven primarily by diagnosable psychopathology in isolated “lone wolf” individuals. The destructive motivations must be situated, instead, within larger social structures and cultural scripts. Second, mental health professionals and scholars must carefully scrutinize any apparent correlation of violence with mental illness for evidence of racial bias in the official systems that define, measure, and record psychiatric diagnoses, as well as those that enforce laws and impose criminal justice sanctions. Third, to better understand the role of firearm access in the occurrence and lethality of mass shootings, research should be guided by an overarching framework that incorporates social, cultural, legal, and political, but also psychological, aspects of private gun ownership in the United States. Fourth, effective policies and interventions to reduce the incidence of mass shootings over time—and to prevent serious acts of violence more generally—will require an expanded body of well-funded interdisciplinary research that is informed and implemented through the sustained engagement of researchers with affected communities and other stakeholders in gun violence prevention. Emerging evidence that the coronavirus pandemic has produced a sharp increase both in civilian gun sales and in the social and psychological determinants of injurious behavior adds special urgency to this agenda.

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Mental Illness, the Media, and the Moral Politics of Mass Violence

Cited by 58 publications

References 55 publications

Bots fired: examining social bot evidence in online mass shooting conversations

Bots fired: examining social bot evidence in online mass shooting conversations

Analyzing Polarization in Social Media: Method and Application to Tweets on 21 Mass Shootings

Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Future of Psychiatric Research into American Gun Violence

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