Social Media and Mass Shooting Horrors
The article “Social Media Companies Struggle To Pull Livestreamed Video Of Mass Shootings” is discussing the difficult time that popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are having removing viral videos of the mass shooting that occurred at a mosque in New Zealand. It reports that a live video feed was being uploaded to Facebook as the shooting was taking place and soon after it was quickly spreading around social media like a wildfire. This is important to pay attention to, because it is focused on a number of important things. Some of them being citizens rights to upload certain things to social media, exposing people to such a horrible event and whether this is giving these shooters the publicity they want.
The content standards that this article and activity connect to are the third, “Content Standard 3 — Students apply geographic knowledge and skills (e.g., location, place, human/environment interactions, movement, and regions),” and the sixth, “Content Standard 6 — Students demonstrate an understanding of the impact of human interaction and cultural diversity on societies.” The Grand Challenge that this connects to is “Valuing World Cultures.” Some questions students might ask after reading this article are: “Why would anyone film a mass shooting?” or “Do these social media platforms have the right to take the videos down?” or, “What happened to the person who was shooting? And the person filming?”
The activity I would like to do with this article in my classroom is based on the instructional routine of questionnaires from our 50 Routines book. I think that this would help students understand what is going on in this article better, by giving them questions that connect more familiar aspects of their lives to it. First, I would do popcorn reading of the article with the students, then I would hand out the questionnaires and explain to students that they need to fill this out individually. Some statements I would include in the questionnaire are: “It is okay to post a violent video on my Facebook page,” “The authorities of Facebook are not allowed to take down anything I post on my page,” and, “If someone were committing a violent mass crime I would record it.” The questionnaire I want to use would be modeled closely after the one on page 62 of our 50 Routines books. I would make sure it is anonymous and that students provided their reasoning for their agreement or disagreement to each statement provided.
