Twitter shows love for Lee Rigby

Scientists studying the social media activity in the immediate aftermath of Lee Rigby's murder have found that messages loaded with racial tension and hate were far less likely to spread than those infused with love. By collecting half a million tweets related to the attack via Twitter, academics from the University's Collaborative Online Social Media Observatory ( COSMOS ) were able to statistically model how the public reacted and have published their findings in the international peer-reviewed journal Social Network Analysis and Mining. The authors were particularly interested in identifying the tweets that were most likely to spread following the event. "The results were surprising, and did not support the common conception that social media platforms are havens for those spreading hateful and social disruptive online content," said Dr Matthew Williams, from the School of Social Sciences. "To the contrary, we found that tweets that included high levels of racial tension, such as those spreading hateful content towards those of Muslim faith, were statistically less likely to be retweeted than messages containing positive sentiment, such as tweets of good-wishes to the family of Lee Rigby," he added. Messages of love, the academics found, were statistically more likely to be frequently retweeted and form large and long lasting information flows. This was based on a methodology that focused on the emotive content of messages such as negative and positive sentiment, and racial tension, as well as content linking features within messages, such as hashtags and URLs.