Social Media as Discourse

I was swiping through the top news stories this morning when I came across this article on USA Today about a woman who had posted pictures of herself posing with a black giraffe she had killed during a hunt in South Africa. I bring this up, not to debate the ethics of hunting animals for sport, but rather to discuss the reactions that played out over social media in response to the pictures.

The post that started it all was made two years ago on June 22, 2017 by a woman named Tess Thompson Talley. I don’t know what kind of media buzz the post generated back then, but it sparked a firestorm when it was shared by the news media outlet AfricaDigest (@africlandpost) on June 16, 2018. Since then, the post has been retweeted 38,581 times, has 22,467 likes and generated 5.8K comments. It’s even spawned its own hashtag (#TessThompsonTalley) which, according to Hashtags.org analytics, in the past 24 hours was up to an estimated 155 tweets per hour.

Suffice it to say, all the attention is not good. Keyhole, another social media analytics tool shows that the sentiment in 63% of  the posts using this hashtag are negative while only 15% are positive with another 22% neutral.

Word cloud made up of keywords being used with #TessThompsonTalley

One prominent tweet that has since been removed, encouraged viewers to share the link to her Facebook profile and “give her as much abuse as possible!” Another Twitter user called for followers to “name and shame this grotesque excuse for a human being.”

The article then goes on to quote a tweet from actor Ricky Gervais and an Instagram post from actress Debra Messing criticizing Talley’s actions which has so far earned 129,644 and 31,150 likes, respectively. This is a very controversial topic that has elicited some very strong emotions on both sides of the argument, but what is it that prompts individuals to join in the conversation in the first place? What is it that motivates someone to throw in their 2 cents?

Bruns (2007) states in his article Beyond Difference: Reconfiguring Education for the User-Led Age that, “the social capital stemming from recognition for one’s contributions to the produsage process (at least amongst peers, if not on a wider stage) can be a significant motivation for participation in produsage, and must be identified as such.” Does this sufficiently explain the viral status of #TessThompsonTalley? Are we all still just after our 15 minutes of fame, 140 characters at a time?

I posed a similar question recently in a comment to another blog post but does a platform like Twitter actually encourage genuine discourse or does it simply give those with an already loud voice an even bigger audience? Does Twitter and other social media outlets promote a diversity of opinion or does it perpetuate a herd mentality? If you have any thoughts on the issue please feel free to leave a comment.