Social media in the news

Alabama police charge 8-year-old with murder in death of 1-year-old

In this article on CNN.com, a picture of a tweet about the case from the Birmingham Police Twitter page is shown. This use of social media in the article about the situation leads readers to different media outlets to search for more information on the topic. It also probably got the Birmingham Police Twitter page more followers. When you search ‘Alabama police charge 8-year-old with murder in death of 1-year-old’ on Twitter, many different accounts come up that have posted about the news. They either simply shared or retweeted a news account that posted it, or made their own statement regarding the situation sometimes providing a link to the article. Hashtags were also used in various tweets. On Facebook, many news accounts have posted a story about this event. There was a lot of backlash about the charging an 8-year-old with murder by Facebook users that came across the article and read it. Many statuses were posted regarding people’s personal opinions on the situation, seeing that Facebook is used by most to share those thoughts with their “friends”.