Tweeting Mass Shootings: The Dynamics of Issue Attention on Social Media

Abstract

Mass shootings in the United States have gained public attention in the past decade and have elicited heated debate over firearm regulations. Meanwhile, social media outlets like Twitter have become a central platform for such attention. In this paper, we propose to detect patterns of issue attention on mass shootings by tracing the volume of relevant tweets. We compiled two datasets using both traditional and computational methods. One dataset is of mass shooting events, and the other is of tweets about mass shootings on Twitter. Our focus is twofold, as we conceptualize social media discourse as both an indicator and a construction of issue attention. First, we examine the longitudinal trend of issue attention in association to mass shooting events. Second, we deconstruct the issue attention into discursive themes and check the variation among those themes. We explore how mass shooting event features affect the ebbs and flows of issue attention.