Project 1-rough draft

THIS IS A ROUGH ROUGH ROUGH ROUGH DRAFT- just warning you. I just kind of wrote little paragraphs of what I am wanting to include possibly. Still trying to figure out the flow and what exactly I'm going to say. 

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When I heard about what had happened in Newtown, CT. on December 16, 2012 my heart broke. 28 people died that day, 18 of them being children. Not only did this hit home because I want to be an elementary teacher one day, but I just thought of my niece and nephews and the innocent families. I chose to look into #Sandyhook on Twitter because I wanted to see who was saying what, what points they were trying to get across or if this was a “24 hour news” type of situation.

I looked at 40 random tweets on Twitter looking up “#Sandyhook”. I chose 40 because I thought that it would be an appropriate sample of tweets and am using them to generalize all of the tweets attached to Sandy Hook. To my surprise there have been far too many tweets for me to look up what was said on the day that this had happened, so I picked tweets that were tweeted in the range from just a couple of minutes ago to a few days ago.

I had expected the tweets to be focused on the families and the grievances that were still taking place, but out of these tweets the most common hashtag that went along with the “#sandyhook” was #guncontrol, #conspiracy, and #fakesandyhook. I had never seen the supposed “conspiracy” video over the Sandy Hook shooting nor did I hear about it, so this shocked me when I was looking over my sample. The most linked media is the Sandy Hook conspiracy video attached with some version of “I can’t believe the government would do this just for stricter gun control. Watch this video and see for yourself”. Out of the 40 tweets that I randomly selected only five of them did not have to do with the conspiracy video. I think sometimes people get angry in these situations and keep looking for answers and can’t accept the fact that some people are just sick and wrong. A lot of the blame has been put on the government because its something still around that we can put the blame on, rather than the shooter who shot himself at the scene.

Although I am not for sure, it seems that more and more conspiracy theorist are joining in the conversation and are the backbone to this movement. It seems to be getting a lot of support from uneducated

All I can really relate this back to is the KONY 2012 video that was launched by an organization called Invisible Children. The days following the launch of this video to make Kony famous, Invisible Children did a really good job of convincing people that they needed to join this movement and so people did. It was a video that was shared to thousands of people and was backed up by them too. After a week or so however, the support for KONY 2012 declined significantly. The moment someone pointed out some flaws in their research was the same moment that everyone who had quickly stood up for what this organization stood for backed down. These people who chose to follow and un-follow the Kony movement so quickly are the ones who didn’t think for them and just did what seemed “right” or the popular thing to do. I feel like that is what people are doing with this video that has come out. They don’t really know what the facts are but they are jumping on the bandwagon and acting like they do.

I noticed that over half of the selected tweets have mentioned “@andersoncooper” in them, and I am very interested in looking more into that and seeing if he has responded to anyone and what the conversation looks like.

I’m not too sure what my two sources are going to be yet. I looked up articles that dealt with conspiracy theories and school shootings but didn’t find anything that looked promising. So I am still working on that part. Because I wasn’t anticipating this to be so focused around the conspiracy theory, I kind of feel like I’m at a loss and not really sure what I’m doing.