From “thank god for helping this person” to “libtards really jumped the shark”: Opinion leaders and (in)civility in the wake of school shootings

Abstract

Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 5996 tweets and 480 mainstream news stories about the Florida State University (FSU) and the Ohio State University (OSU) shootings, we examine who emerges as opinion leaders during crises, the kinds of narratives they help construct about school shootings, and the relative civility of these narratives. We find that the opinion leaders who emerge after a crisis are assumed to have local knowledge about the incident and/or are able to quickly curate information about the incident. In addition, we find that the quality of information spread by opinion leaders is critical to narrative construction and civility. The largely fact-based narratives associated with the FSU incident were far more civil than the OSU narratives, which were based on disinformation and polemics. We conclude the article by calling on scholars to take a more nuanced approach to conceptualizing and studying opinion leaders.