Press and social media reaction to ideologically inspired murder: The case of Lee Rigby

Abstract

This article analyses reaction to the ideologically inspired murder of a soldier, Lee Rigby, in central London by two converts to Islam, Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo. The focus of the analysis is upon the contrast between how the event was reacted to by the UK National Press and on social media. To explore this contrast, we undertook a corpus-assisted discourse analysis to look at three periods during the event: the initial attack, the verdict of the subsequent trial and the sentencing of the murderers. To do this, we constructed and analysed corpora of press and Twitter coverage of the attack, the conviction of the suspects and the sentencing of them. The analysis shows that social media and the press are intertwined, with the press exerting a notable influence through social media, but social media not always being led by the press. When looking at social media reaction to such an event as this, analysts should always consider the role that the press are playing in forming that discourse.

After Woolwich: Analyzing Open Source Communications to Understand the Interactive and Multi-polar Dynamics of the Arc of Conflict

“…Williams and Burnap (2015) focus upon how terrorist attacks such as this, occasion forms of digital cyber-hate. McEnery et al (2015) use the same case to explore interactions between National Press and social media, inding the former play an important role in steering and guiding the content of the latter in the aftermaths of atrocity events. Most recently, Innes et al (2016) have conducted a detailed analysis of social media data collected in the 12 months following the murder of Fusilier Rigby, to distil a new framework for analyzing processes of social reaction.…”

Unusual feeling: A Narrative Review of the psychological condition of a juvenile inmates

“…Figure 3 shows that cases of maltreatment and murder are still relatively high among juvenile inmates. This is an important reference for us researchers, why teenagers easily commit criminal acts such as immorality, drugs, to torture and murder, even though this act violates applicable legal norms (MacMillan & Glass, 2016;McEnery, McGlashan, & Love, 2015;Price & Khubchandani, 2017).…”

A conceptual framework for studying collective reactions to events in location-based social media

“…Related work on reactions to events expressed in social media can be differentiated by the category of the event the reaction is related to and by the purpose of the study. Event categories include natural disasters (Hashimoto et al 2013), speeches (Amanatullah et al 2013), health-related events (Szomszor et al 2011, Fung et al 2015, Nikfarjam et al 2015, Meaney et al 2016, advertising campaigns (Rodrigues 2016), criminal and terrorist events (Burnap et al 2014, Kounadi et al 2015McEnery et al 2015), protests or unrest (He et al 2015), and entertainment-related events (Lipizzi et al 2016). The purpose of such studies includes investigating the diffusion of reactions (Burnap et al 2014), analysing perception of events (i.e.…”

“…The purpose of such studies includes investigating the diffusion of reactions (Burnap et al 2014), analysing perception of events (i.e. the attitudes and concerns triggered by an event) (Hashimoto et al 2013, He et al 2015, Kounadi et al 2015, Meaney et al 2016, identifying trusted or credible information sources (Szomszor et al 2011), event detection from reactions including monitoring (Amanatullah et al 2013, Nikfarjam et al 2015, assessment of the effectiveness of advertising campaigns (Rodrigues 2016), sales prediction (Lipizzi et al 2016) or interrelationships with news media (Castillo et al 2014, Tsytsarau et al 2014, Fung et al 2015, McEnery et al 2015. Importantly, the last topic explicitly makes the link between another mediumthe influence of the press on the reactions to an event, making clear that social media reactions cannot be considered as purely a function of a given event, but rather a discourse conducted through a multitude of media around an event.…”