Abstract
How should we interpret gun images on social media? Take for example the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School. Media articles revealed that the gunman, a white adolescent male, posted images of firearms and other weapons on his social media profile prior to the shooting. On the other hand, when it comes to Black communities, digital policing strategies often intercept images with guns and individuals thought to be associated with gangs before a crime is ever committed. In this study, we use a mixed methods approach, situated in social systems theory, to make meaning of gun posting behavior among Black youth who associate with gangs in Chicago. We collected and examined a corpus of Twitter images (1851) through snowball sampling of a well-known deceased gang member in Chicago and users in their Twitter network. We identified 560 images that contain guns and asked two distinct groups to annotate images: formerly gang-involved outreach workers, known as community domain experts, at a local Chicago violence prevention organization and Master of Social Work students at Columbia University. After comparing their results, findings highlighted the prevalence and frequency of gun image posting within this corpus and critical differences in how community domain experts and social work annotators perceive guns. The various underlying intents provide a rich source of knowledge for understanding the symbolic nature of guns in the digital age.
Highlights
In recent years, social media has become an ecological environment or neighborhood (Stevens et al, 2017), where digital scripts and narratives convey a wide range of emotional attributes among them happiness, love, trauma, and pain
This study examines the 2012–2017 gun image-posting behavior of Black youth—including some who self-identify as gang involved—who live in Chicago neighborhoods that have high rates of gun violence
We review extant literature on the relationship among guns, gangs, and social media, and address three primary questions: the frequency, prevalence, and type of gun images posted among Black youth in Chicago; gun image-posting behaviors and the extent to which they are gendered; and a description and comparison of community domain experts’ and social work annotators’ perceptions of aggression in images with guns
Summary
Social media has become an ecological environment or neighborhood (Stevens et al, 2017), where digital scripts and narratives convey a wide range of emotional attributes among them happiness, love, trauma, and pain. For young people living in communities with high rates of gun violence, social media becomes a digital street where taunts, arguments, and threats may play out over Twitter conversations or Facebook live feeds—the study of which elucidates how physical neighborhood conflicts unfold and who is involved (Lane, 2018). While computational tools offer new ways of understanding the links between social media communication and gun violence, there are real concerns about the potential for misinterpreting images on social media in the absence of sufficient context. Focusing on youth living in communities with high rates of gun violence, Patton and colleagues (2017) argue that youth may discuss or post pictures of guns as a way to posture and display digital gravitas, rather than having real intent to carry out gun violence. Community insights (e.g., backstories, language, and general context) into the reasons young people post gun images on social media receive limited attention or acknowledgement in this literature
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