Tweets, Death, and Rock 'n' Roll

Abstract

This paper introduces a new line of investigation into Social Media Mourning (SMM), the act of individual and collective grieving on social media. Previous research has analysed this behaviour as a response to a death within a family unit or amongst a group of friends.We report on SMM in the context of the death of a celebrity. We present a comparative analysis of two social media platforms, Twitter and Sina Weibo (henceforth ’Weibo’). Uniquely, we have also sought to understand the feelings and attitudes of social media users who do not engage in SMM, but inevitably encounter the posts of others. This was accomplished through online surveys in both English and Chinese, representing the majority language groups of each platform. We have critically evaluated the theoretical frameworks of slacktivism, information cascades, and herd behaviour, and found herd behaviour to be the most applicable lens for understanding our specific case study: SMM centred on the death of Chester Bennington, an American singer-songwriter best known as the lead vocalist for the group Linkin Park. Through a mixed method approach combining qualitative and quantitative analyses, we discovered that Twitter users, who are more likely than Weibo users to actively mourn the death of a celebrity by posting on social media, are also more likely to be emotionally affected by it.Weibo users, on the other hand, are more willing to see the content of mourning the death of a celebrity, but being more emotionally distanced, viewing SMM postings simply as news. Finally, although SMM is a manifestation of herd behaviour in our case study, we also point to an example where the power of the masses was successfully harnessed for real world effect.