Social Media and Violence: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Session II, Virtual Room 3: Social Media & Violence

This panel will explore the way social media reflects, interrupts, and encourages violence. Professor Candace Parrish will present the paper, “You Can Start a Movement with a Hashtag’: An Exploration of Student-Led Social Media Activism.” When the Virtual Becomes Real: Gender Violence and Social, Mobile, and Interactive Media. Dr. Parrish's work explores how intimate partner violence and sexual assault (IPV/SA) have been increasingly discussed due to the onslaught of attention that has circulated online and how students perceived social media more as a tool for education and awareness that has potential to serve as a change agent for prevention. Dr. Senbel and Dr. Bryan will present analysis of the reaction to religious violence on social media. Using data and sentiment analysis on Twitter, Senbel and Bryan selected three events that were high profile and generated a lot of tweets: the shooting in a Black church in Charleston in 2015, the shooting in a synagogue in Pittsburg in 2018, and a shooting in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019. Their research explores the network of media influencers, white supremacy groups, anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic organizations that drive twitter responses to religiously-motivated violence.