Online comments
These comments came from Facebook, Reddit and online petitions concerning the Cincinnati Zoo incident. The names attached are screen names from the originating social media accounts.
"That gorilla wasn't going to harm him what so ever. The mom should have got put down for not knowing how to take care of her damn child. The gorilla was doing a better job at parenting then she was!!"
— Shanae Sumling
"This bashing of the parents needs to stop before someone gets injured. The treatment of the mother is horrifying. None of us are perfect, nor were we there."
— Lynne Acres
"$30 allows each and every person who enters the zoo to determine at any given moment how much of their common sense they wish to use that day. Apparently, she didn't want to use any. She is to blame."
— Chandra Beaty
"Why does every tragedy have to be someone's fault? I think everyone is so focused on assigning blame (to make themselves feel better?) that it's easy to just forget about the tragedy itself. (That) kind of scares me."
— Communist Rhetoric
"It is a horrible dilemma. I am sure the zoo staff is devastated (even though activists often depict zoos as prisons, they are full of people who deeply care about and greatly respect animals), and I myself am devastated that such a beautiful primate was killed."
— Frans De Waal
"Move on! The little boy is alive and the gorilla is dead. Gun free Chicago had 60 shootings over the holiday weekend. That's a real problem!"
— Steve Danielewicz
"I really feel the responsibility falls equally on the zoo and the parents. There should be absolutely no way a small child should be able to gain entrance to any of the enclosures with the animals. No excuses allowed there."
— Opinionated_Jerk
Public reaction to the shooting of a gorilla last week at the Cincinnati Zoo went from shock to outrage to blame to perspective in a matter of hours, illustrating how social media has changed the speed of communication — and how it is made it more strident.
A child fell into the zoo's gorilla enclosure. A gorilla grabbed the child, and the gorilla was shot. Within hours, before clear video was available, before zoo or public safety officials had spoken at length, some social media posters were calling for the mother of the injured child to be shot, or all zoos to be permanently closed.
Others said most parents have lost track of their children at least once, and only “liars or idiots” would say otherwise.
“Nowadays a lot of people see the internet in general as a place to judge other people or let their negativity fly,” said Jesse Fox, assistant professor of communication at Ohio State. “Some try to take a polite tack (to push back), and that’s usually a very unsuccessful strategy.
“Trying to be a rational, upstanding person and take the high road in an internet argument is just not a thing. That’s a sad fact.”
Joe Valenzano, chairman of the University of Dayton’s department of communication, said social media is not representative of society as a whole, because social media conversations often draw extreme opinions, as more mild-mannered people keep their opinions to themselves.
“The more controversial the issue, the more it attracts people on the extremes and the less it attracts people in middle, because the people in the middle feel like they could be coming under assault from either or both sides,” he said.
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The gorilla incident
A 3-year-old boy zipped through a partial wire barrier and some bushes before tumbling more than 10 feet into a shallow moat at the zoo's Gorilla World exhibit last Saturday, leading his mother and others to call 911.
Zoo officials said they tried to call the gorillas away from the boy, and two female gorillas did leave. But the 450-pound male, named Harambe, remained. Video shows the gorilla being gentle with the boy at times, but also dragging him roughly through the water. One eyewitness said Harambe threw the boy high in the air at one point. Others say he was mainly protecting the boy.
Zoo director Thayne Maynard said professional zoo staff and first responders were unanimous that the boy was in danger, saying his head bounced against concrete as Harambe dragged him. The zoo’s Dangerous Animal Response Team shot and killed the gorilla.
Sharp, early reaction
Almost immediately, social media outlets Facebook, Twitter and Reddit were full of criticism for the boy’s mother for not monitoring him closely, with one poster calling her “explicitly negligent” and another saying she should be “put down.”
A Change.org petition called for the parents to be held legally responsible and went so far as to call for a home investigation by child protection authorities. That petition approached a half-million signatures Thursday. The most popular comment on the petition, liked by thousands, criticizes the mother for not thanking the zoo in her first response, although she thanked “everyone that helped me and my son.”
The spreading of misinformation certainly is not new — Jonathan Swift wrote 300 years ago that, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.” A more well-known version, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, goes, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
But social media multiplies the audience for information, both good and bad. Erin Thase, a psychologist with UC Health, told our partner WCPO-TV in Cincinnati that extreme comments are natural on social media because posters want a reaction.
“Everyone wants to be the expert, because if you’re the first to say it or … you have that Facebook comment that gets put on the news or gets streamed somewhere, then you have that instant recognition,” Thase said. “You have a little bit of fame to it.”
As more details of the gorilla incident emerged, many added blame for the zoo, saying gaps in the barrier made it too easy for a child to slip through. Others argued the gorilla was trying to protect the boy, so zoo officials should not have fired, leading one poster to joke that Facebook and Youtube had created a world of “experts on gorilla behavior.”
“Social media makes everybody (a so-called) expert in everything, but people confuse opinions with real analysis. That’s one of the frustrations of social media today,” Valenzano said. “People need to hold themselves accountable for being critical consumers of information. … Before we form judgments about events or people, we have to gather as much information and facts as possible.”
Tide turns
After the first wave of blame, social media posters started to push back. Several bloggers who write about parenthood shared stories of how their children once slipped away and were almost lost or hit by cars.
The blog Real Life Parenting wrote, “If you do have kids, you should know how easy it is for something like this to happen and you should be sympathetic and thankful nothing this terrifying happened to you during one of those times when you didn’t have eyes on your kid.”
The zoo got some cover from animal experts and primatologists who said the zoo was put in a lose-lose situation. Celebrity zookeeper Jack Hanna defended the decision to shoot, and primatologist Frans De Waal wrote that it was "a horrible dilemma" requiring an immediate decision, and added he doesn't know what he would have done in the moment.
A Reddit poster said people on social media will judge no matter what, saying, “Reddit spends half the time complaining about parents being overprotective, and half the time saying that it’s the mum’s fault for not watching him at all times.”
Negativity ‘contagious’
Many people cheer social media for increasing the amount of information that is quickly available, and making it easy to share, whether traditional media are doing so or not. But others focus on the negative side.
“We have some evidence, from older psychology studies, that when you put people in a negative environment, a lot of times they’re inclined to be more negative. … Negativity is kind of a contagious experience,” OSU’s Fox said. “That’s not unique to social media, but there are fewer politeness norms on the internet than face-to-face.”
A 2013 study in the Journal of Management Information Systems showed emotionally charged Twitter messages tend to be retweeted more often and more quickly compared to neutral ones.
And Fox said because many people would rather not cause confrontations with online “friends,” people are more likely to quietly block or ignore cruel, offensive comments, rather than call out someone.
Valenzano said there are variety of reasons people are willing to post extreme comments or pass judgment on social media — the partial anonymity, the cathartic effect of posting a strongly held belief, and the fact that with a large audience of “friends” at least some of them are likely to agree.
CNN commentator Mel Robbins called for people to stop blaming, saying “our insatiable need to find fault in everything that happens in life” is tragic. Online blogger Christy Lee Parker went the other way, saying “We should be picking apart everything that could have prevented this from happening — not to put someone on trial by public opinion, but to recognize what can be done so we never see something like this again.”
Traditional media
When this newspaper asked readers what they thought of the tone of social media, some of them criticized us. Aimee Shannon said news sources too often post inflammatory stories, “then sit back while people engage in flaming responses.”
Fox said that’s a tough situation for media companies “competing for eyeballs and clicks online.”
“It’s a very delicate business right now … so is that the sacrifice you make so you get your clicks and sell your ads?” she said. “Or do you have a responsibility as a community leader to encourage positive discourse?”
Valenzano said news media have a responsibility for making sure the stories they produce are fair and appropriate, but have little control over how people will respond.
“The social media platform itself is merely a tool,” he said. “The way people use it is more about who they are as individuals than about the tool itself.”
Or as reader Ashley Baxley put it, “In the court of public opinion, affectionately known as social media, no one REALLY cares about your thoughts — they just want the opportunity to argue how THEY feel. This is true for the gorilla, the lion, the stupid dress, the election, the Kardashians, and any other trending or obscure topic.
“Go BE something or DO something that makes you or someone else happy. Go live for yourself and not the trolls on social media.”
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