Copycat crime? (Image: AP Photo/Jonathan Drew)
IT IS now possible to watch footage of someone being murdered on your Facebook feed, sandwiched between a holiday sunset selfie and a cat playing the piano. Thatâs not just bizarre and unpleasant: it could encourage people to commit such acts more often.
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The latest shareable carnage is the killing of Virginia local television reporters Alison Parker and Adam Ward, who were shot last Wednesday by a former colleague. After the murder, the shooter orchestrated a full social media publicity roll-out, including a , before killing himself a few hours later. The shooterâs Twitter profile accrued more than 23,000 followers, the video went viral on Facebook and was compressed into shareable gifs for easier dissemination.
Some considered sharing these images . âOur society unfortunately needs vivid reminders of the awesome, life-stopping power of firearms,â website.
But research so far suggests that might not be such a good idea.
There is already strong evidence that suicide is contagious, and this has led many media outlets to . âResearch shows a ,â says at the University of Exeter, UK.
Does media coverage make people more likely to commit murder, too? Although some shooters, including the one in Virginia, cite previous incidents as inspiration for their crimes, research has so far been lacking, partly due to a general resistance to gun control in the US (see âShhh! Donât mention the killingâ). Now, the , has found that they, too, are contagious (PLoS ONE, ).
at Arizona State University in Tempe and her colleagues investigated the patterns in these events using a model previously used to describe the spread of epidemic diseases, , and earthquake aftershocks. They found that the occurrence of a mass killing â which they defined as the death of four or more people â meant that another shooting was significantly more likely to happen within the next 13 days.
âThe occurrence of a mass killing makes another more likely to happen within the next 13 daysâ
The body count of a given shooting is not important in itself, Towers suggests. It is whether a shooting receives local or national news coverage. âItâs the attention, not the numbers,â she says. The reason for this, she thinks, is that an event reported in the national media is able to reach the very limited population that might potentially commit a copycat crime.
âThere arenât many people susceptible to this contagion, maybe one in a million,â she says. âYou have to have a psychological âimmune systemâ that is vulnerable to being infected by these kinds of imagesâ, the way people with compromised immune systems catch the flu. To do this, a story has to go national.
Towersâs research did not distinguish between traditional and social media. But other studies indicate how social sites can give a story national reach even without official media coverage. For example, Facebookâs reach dwarfs that of any traditional media channel: making something go viral with Facebookâs 1.49 billion members does not depend on a national news organisation deeming it newsworthy.
So social media gives the means, but why do people transmit this material? Why did people share the video of the Virginia shooting, or the videos and manifestos posted by the , or the horrific images and videos broadcast by ISIS?
There is evidence that social media not only makes it easier to spread information, but it changes the dynamics of its spread. A clue to why this might be so comes from research into how we interact with others online. In our daily lives, we generally adapt our behaviour according to the social situations we find ourselves in. But online, these various aspects of our persona flatten into a single public face â a phenomenon known as . Could information itself be subject to a similar flattening?
The Facebook feed already collapses gossip, advertising, entertainment, world news and games into a single homogenised stream of content. That could make it easier to share without thinking too hard about it, says social media researcher at Microsoft Research.
âThey share because theyâre affected by what they see,â she says. âThey arenât thinking about the context in which their post will appear. They arenât thinking about how publicity is desired by those producing the videos. They are thinking about their own emotions and the people they know who they think need to know.â
More ominously, it might be that we share horrifying content because its producers are getting better at packaging it. Research has shown that gossip is king on social media, and advertisers, marketers and publishers quickly cottoned on and changed the way they presented information. Thomas Poell at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands says this explains the success of headlines like âYou wonât believe what happened nextâ and âOne weird trickâ.
His research suggests activists learned from marketing. âOur main conclusion is that social platforms strongly focus public attention on the spectacular, comical and violent aspects of protest,â he says (Information, Communication & Society, ).
Shooters and ISIS have turned the social media activism model to their advantage. âObviously these people are not similar to activists,â Poell says. âBut some of the mechanisms we have identified in our research on activist social media communication do play a role.â
Once virality hits a certain threshold, the number of people reposting content overwhelms any human attempts to review and censor them. Facebook and Twitter removed the Virginia gunmanâs account within minutes, but it was too late. The video of Parker and Wardâs last moments will likely never be scrubbed from the internet.
So as with suicide, so for murder. Whether through traditional media or social share, viral popularity moves the spark one step closer to the powder keg.
And if that video does pop up in your Facebook feed? âWatching is up to the individual,â says Towers. âBut itâs worth remembering that you can never unsee something.â
Shhh! donât mention the killing
Itâs not every day that a scientist undertakes ground-breaking research with no funding at all. But thatâs what Arizona State University statistician Sherry Towers had to do in order to produce the first study on the contagion of mass shootings in the US (see main story). âWe basically had to do this in our spare time,â she says.
Thatâs because since 1997, the US Congress has restricted research into mass shootings. A bill passed in 1996 stipulated that no Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding could be used to advocate or promote gun control. This was vague enough to ensure that research into the effects of gun violence has never been funded since.
The idea for the study struck Towers when a meeting at Purdue University was cancelled due to a school shooting there. âI thought, wait a second, this is the fourth shooting [in the US] this week,â Towers says. Was this merely a blip, she wondered, or were these events becoming more frequent?
A national database recording all shootings would make it easier to find out, but the funding restrictions also apply here. However, a released last month did conclude that mass shootings are on the rise and highlighted the need for more research to inform policymakers.
This article appeared in print under the headline âWhat to do when murder goes viralâ
