The dynamics of Twitter users’ gun narratives across major mass shooting events

Abstract

This study reveals a shift of gun-related narratives created by two ideological groups during three high-profile mass shootings in the United States across the years from 2016 to 2018. It utilizes large-scale, longitudinal social media traces from over 155,000 ideology-identifiable Twitter users. The study design leveraged both the linguistic dictionary approach as well as thematic coding inspired by Narrative Policy Framework, which allows for statistical and qualitative comparison. We found several distinctive narrative characteristics between the two ideology groups in response to the shooting events-two groups differed by how they incorporated linguistic and narrative features in their tweets in terms of policy stance, attribution (how one believed to be the problem, the cause or blame, and the solution), the rhetoric employed, and emotion throughout the incidents. The findings suggest how shooting events may penetrate the public discursive processes that had been previously dominated by existing ideological references and may facilitate discussions beyond ideological identities. Overall, in the wake of mass shooting events, the tweets adhering to the majority policy stance within a camp declined, whereas the proportion of mixed or flipped stance tweets increased. Meanwhile, more tweets were observed to express causal reasoning of a held policy stance, and a different pattern in the use of rhetoric schemes, such as the decline of provocative ridicule, emerged. The shifting patterns in users' narratives coincide with the two groups distinctive emotional response revealed in text. These findings offer insights into the opportunity to reconcile conflicts and the potential for creating civic technologies to improve the interpretability of linguistic and narrative signals and to support diverse narratives and framing.

The effect of mass shootings on daily emotions is limited by time, geographic proximity, and political affiliation

“…Gun policy is one of the most partisan topics in US politics (9,10), and the findings from our analysis provide suggestive evidence that the immediate emotional responses to nearby mass shootings are at least partially filtered through one's political identity. This finding is consistent with research showing distinct belief systems between Republicans and Democrats regarding causes of and solutions to mass shootings in the context of extreme political polarization (11,12).…”

Shifting narrative strategies: How monument advocates change their stories in response to conflict over time

“…This paper uses and builds on data collected for a previous project that looked at how advocacy organizations prioritize narrative strategies on traditional long‐form media outlets (e.g., newsletter and press releases) versus space‐limited media platforms like Twitter (Gottlieb Schomburg et al, unpublished ). Twitter data is used both in response to a growing body of literature within the NPF that evaluates narratives on social media (Merry, 2016; Gupta et al, 2016; Lin & Chung, 2020; Lybecker et al, 2015; Pattison et al, 2021) as well as increased use of such platforms by advocacy organizations (Greenberg & MacAuley, 2009; Lybecker et al, 2015; Saxton et al, 2007). As advocacy groups increasingly turn to social media to disseminate their preferences, it is important that these platforms are analyzed to determine the viability of the framework for such narratives (Merry, 2016) as well as elucidate any nuances for these sources of policy narratives.…”

“…The NPF provides several foundational hypotheses for meso‐level analysis including the use of narrative strategies such as expanding the scope of the conflict to gain support for a policy position (Shanahan et al, 2017). Meso‐level analysis remains the most commonly studied scale within the NPF and has been examined in a variety of settings from environmental issues such as fracking (Gottlieb et al, 2018) to Sanctuary Cities (McBeth & Lybecker, 2018; Shanahan et al, 2013) and gun policy (Lin & Chung, 2020; Merry, 2016; Smith‐Walter et al, 2016). Studies at the meso‐level are primarily conducted using a standardized yet easily modified codebook which allows for empirical assessment of narrative elements and strategies.…”

Assessing Social Media Data as a Resource for Firearm Research: Analysis of Tweets Pertaining to Firearm Deaths

“…To date, such data have been deployed in firearm-related research in several ways, including to record narratives, sentiment, and emotion around shooting events [17][18][19][20]; characterize gun advertisements on social media [21]; and reflect opinions on gun policies and gun control [22,23]. In this paper, we take up the question of how social media data may contribute to understanding firearm-related outcomes.…”