A follow-up of New Zealand Christchurch’s shooting
Posted by Cassandra Huang
Welcome back, folks! Hope everyone had a restful or a productive spring break!
If you are a follower of our ABSMCC blog, you must still remember our last post before spring break: “Darkest day” in New Zealand: Mass shooting on Friday.” The shooting in New Zealand was ten days ago, but we can still see many discussions on news websites and social media. Today, we have a follow-up a report of this sad incident. Last time we used Social Studio to analyze social media posts from New Zealand and the US. Today we include Tweets from five English-speaking countries: New Zealand, Australia, US, Canada, and UK. In the figure, we can see that the majority of tweets are still from the US.
When the shooting just happened, the top tweeted words include “New Zealand,” “Christchurch,” “hatred,” “Muslim,” “community,” “affected,” “attack,” “victims” and “terrorist” etc. (See the last blog post). After ten days, people started to make meanings behind the incident, for example, gun laws, political power, and the way the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, deals with the racism issue. As you can see in the word cloud, the top mentioned words include “Jacinda Ardern,” “right-wing,” “thread,” “banned,” “weaken” and “assault,” etc. To be noticed, the hashtag “#howtosellamassacre” has been mentioned a lot. We can find that it comes from retweets of a post written by “@AJEnglish.” This post discussed the gun law in Australia.
The other thing to be noticed is the influencers. The most influential Tweeter accounts are usually the main steam English-speaking news media. But in this incident, the top one influencer is “@mustafa_agha,” who is an Arabic-speaking sports journalist for the Middle East Broadcasting Center. In the post, he shows the appreciation of the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern.
