The first tweet about the death of Michael Brown was a minute or two after he collapsed on Canfield Dr., just past noon Aug. 9, 2014. Local rapper Emanuel Freeman (@ TheePharaoh) tweeted from inside his home a photo of Browns body face down in the street, an officer standing over him.
12:03 p.m. "Just saw someone die OMFG."
12:03 p.m. "I'm about to hyperventilate."
12:04 p.m. "the police just shot someone dead in the of my crib yo."
And then a minute later, within five minutes of the shooting, the picture of an officer standing over Browns prone body. Twitter users identified the officer as Darren Wilson.
Forty minutes later, at 12:48 p.m., a previously unknown young woman, La Toya Cash, joined the conversation. She posted this tweet as @AyoMissDarkSkin: "Ferguson police just executed an unarmed 17-year-old boy that was walking to the store. Shot him 10 times smh."
The account of the "boy" "executed" walking on the street and shot 10 times established Mike Browns victimhood. smh--Twitter speak for "shaking my head,"--drove home the point, as did a photo showing dozens of police cars in the street.
The tweet was retweeted 3,500 times in the next few hours, researchers found, as word of the shooting passed through the community like an electrical charge. @AyoMissDarkSkin's report received much more attention than the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's first report of the killing several hours later.
As Ben Lyons reports in his social media analysis (pg. 14), the narrative quickly emerging in social media was that Brown had his hands up, was executed or shot in the back. This was picked up in traditional media where references to hands up, shot in the back and executed appeared six times more often in the days after the killing than terms indicating a struggle with the officer.
But that narrative was wrong. As the Justice Department's investigation concluded seven months later, "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" didn't happen. And Brown didn't look like a "gentle giant" in the convenience store video police released.
Few of the media accounts--either social or traditional--included the fact that Brown struggled with Officer Darren Wilson over Wilson's gun--a key factor in Wilson's ultimate exoneration.
Hands Up, Don't Shoot was a myth created in the hot media environment that came alive in the hours after Brown's death. "Eyewitness" accounts on Twitter, cable news and elsewhere turned out to have been based on what people who hadn't seen the shooting had read on Twitter or heard from neighbors.
Although this thread was not about Brown, I would like to clear up two things.
1: Hands up, Don't shoot is not a MYTH. It is merely a saying to signify the fear of being assumed a 'threat' that justifies being shot.
2. Brown's struggle WAS in the reports. However, the shooting did not happen DURING that struggle, making the fact of him being unarmed and still shot after fleeing a relevant concern.
at them ...
