Just like with Marina Joyce, those involved felt an odd mix of both panic and pride.
After the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013, users of the news and networking site Reddit banded together to try to identify the bomber using photographs, audio from police scanners, and CCTV footage. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. The user doesn’t need a lengthy education to become an investigator, it’s all at their fingertips.” Social media makes this type of behaviour affordable and accessible. “If a person compares themselves to someone who they perceive to be better able and then they beat them in solving a case like this, it makes them feel good about themselves. “In all areas of our lives we engage in a process called social comparison,” says Alison Attrill, a senior lecturer of Cyberpsychology Research at the University of Wolverhampton. By playing detective, those who shared theories and screenshots were allowed to feel another, very different but equally contagious emotion. If people think others have similar views or emotions then hysteria can result as they confirm the accuracy of each other, and so emotions spiral.”īut the users of #SaveMarinaJoyce didn’t just feel panic and hysteria. “This pressure exacerbates groupthink as there is no time to check facts or consider other explanations. “There is a pressure on people to react instantly as this can enhance a person’s popularity within a group,” says Jacqui Taylor, a chartered psychologist and cyberpscyhology researcher and lecturer at the University of Bournemouth. Historically this has led to outbreaks of mass hysteria such as the Salem witch trials, but on the internet the potential for hysteria to spread is even greater. It’s an age-old phenomenon whereby an individual’s emotions trigger similar emotions in others. “This is called emotional contagion.”Įmotional contagion isn’t new either. “Emotion can be transmitted via computer-mediated communication and can go viral,” he says. In a 2013, paper on how emotions diffuse across social media, Steiglitz discovered that emotionally charged messages tend to be retweeted more often and more quickly. “If people get new information that is in contrast to what they believe then they tend to neglect this new information for as long as possible.”
Tells of histera professional#
“This phenomenon is not entirely new,” says Stefan Stieglitz, a professor of professional communication in electronic media at the University of Duisburg-Essen. #ETeam #savemarinajoyce- Enfield MPS July 27, 2016 Officers have visited YouTube user Marina Joyce. She says that for the two days that #SaveMarinaJoyce trended, she only had three-and-a-half hours’ sleep. Vandermaelen has been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder, and says she suffers attacks if “something huge happens like this” or if one of her idols dies. I had to ask my mother to calm me down, it lasted a few hours.” “I had to pause the videos to keep myself together and not burst out crying. “It felt like every wall came towards me and I couldn’t get out,” says Usha Vandermaelen, a 19-year-old student from Belgium, who suffered a panic attack while following the hashtag and watching Marina’s videos. ‘The more I believed she was being abused, the more I got anxious’ More than 60 people tweeted that it had caused them to have an anxiety or panic attack. Thousands of teenagers revealed that they couldn’t sleep and were shaking from their belief that Marina had been kidnapped or was being held hostage. When Marina then tried to arrange a 6:30am meet up with her fans, some speculated she was involved in a trap set by Isis. After a fan compiled a list of their concerns on – a site dedicated to sharing blocks of text easily – the hashtag #SaveMarinaJoyce became the number one trending topic worldwide. It took four days for the wider internet to fall into a frenzy.
Two weeks later, another video contained elements that worried commenters
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