Analysing the presence of school-shooting related communities at social media sites. (16th December 2010)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Semenov, Alexander; Veijalainen, Jari; Kyppo, Jorma
• Is Part Of: International journal of multimedia intelligence and security. Volume 1:Number 3(2010)
• Page Start: 232
• Page End: 268
• Publication Date: 2010-12-16
• Subjects: school shootings -- multimedia data mining -- social media mining -- ontology -- social network sites; Security systems -- Periodicals; Data protection -- Periodicals; Computer security -- Periodicals; Biometric identification -- Periodicals; 005.8
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2042-3462

Abstract

Surprisingly cruel mass murders and attacks have been witnessed in the educational institutions of the Western world since the 1970s. These are often referred to as 'school shootings'. There have been over 300 known incidents around the world and the number is growing. Social network sites (SNSs) have enabled the perpetrators to express their views and intentions. Our result is that since about 2005, all major school shooters have had a presence in SNS and some have left traces that would have made possible to evaluate their intentions to carry out a rampage. A further hypothesis is that future school shooters will behave in a similar manner and would thus be traceable in the digital sphere. In this paper, we try to take advantage of this tendency and study the presence of school shooting related information in various SNS and its relation to past and perhaps future cases.