Researchers found a connection between the whereabouts of users at the time of the terrorist attack in Vienna on November 2, 2020 and their anxiety.
The terrorist attack in downtown Vienna on November 2, 2020 also provoked many reactions on Twitter. A Viennese research team analyzed them over a year. In the journal “Online Social Networks and Media”, the scientists from the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) report, among other things, on the surprising result that expressions of anxiety were more frequent the further away the Twitter users were from the site of the attack.
Ema Kušen and Mark Strembeck from the Institute for Information Systems and New Media at Vienna University of Economics and Business have been investigating the mechanisms of online communication for several years using data from the Twitter platform that is freely available to researchers. This information opens up completely new possibilities for social researchers. In the case of the Vienna terrorist attack, Kušen and Strembeck were able to identify just over 500,000 tweets that related to the attack over a period of about a year.
So far, it has been shown that such events cause surprisingly similar online reaction patterns internationally. Because of the relatively few Twitter users in this country, however, the absolute number of tweets in the case of attacks in the USA, for example, is higher than that for the Vienna terror, explained Strembeck. The researchers divided the tweets into four time phases: the reactions shortly after the attack up to the following day, then those in the period up to around a week, three months and a year later. Messages and advertising generated by so-called “bots” that used the events as a vehicle for dissemination were sorted out.
“Can live in New York and have family in Vienna”
Following the so-called “Construal Level Theory”, the question was investigated as to how the perceived distance to an event affects – spatially, temporally and socially. “You can also live in New York and have family in Vienna, so there can be a very small social distance to an event even over a large spatial distance,” explained Strembeck. Among other things, it was analyzed whether and which blame can be assigned when, for example, Muslim or refugee people are blamed across the board, and to what extent fear is expressed.
For example, there were relatively many people in India who, as a result of the Vienna terror, remembered an attack in Mumbai and once again expressed their fear. In the immediate aftermath of the events in downtown Vienna, to the surprise of the researchers, people who lived far away from Vienna and Austria reacted most strongly with blame and anxiety, explained Strembeck.
“Extent of blame leveled out afterwards”
“In this country you get rather worrying news along the lines of ‘Are you okay?’ sent – so more empathetic messages.” Fear-filled messages came from Vienna and Austria much less frequently immediately after November 2 than from the rest of the world. According to the WU researcher, such a clear difference has not yet been shown in similar studies: “One could have assumed that someone who is physically closer would also be more afraid of being hit by the violence themselves.”
However, the expression of fear became more frequent in Vienna and Austria after the attack. Among people who are close to Vienna – geographically or socially – the number of blame, some of them very general, increased over time. “Afterwards, the extent to which blame and the fear of terrorism were expressed became the same worldwide,” says Strembeck. Concern and support in and around Vienna gave way to other aspects of the discussion over time.
The development on the first anniversary of the Vienna terror was also striking: the number of relevant tweets rose again significantly and the emotional expressions were relatively similar – more or less irrelevant where in the world the originator was located.
Universal patterns?
The scientists want to apply the study design developed for the tragic incidents in Vienna to other, comparable incidents. This makes it possible to find out whether this pattern can be observed more or less universally in the aftermath of terrorist attacks or natural disasters.
Such research is possible thanks to researchers’ access to Twitter data. However, there seems to be a change here as a result of the takeover of the platform by tech billionaire Elon Musk. It is rumored that Musk wants to pull in a paywall for “Academic Accounts”. Difficult access to a currently very popular data source like Twitter could be a setback for the rapidly developing field of computational social sciences, Strembeck emphasized.
“Afterward, the level of finger pointing and fear of terrorism expressed has converged around the world.”
(WHAT)
