While collective mourning on media outlets is not a new phenomenon, it appears that Twitter has taken the lead when it comes collective mourning. It’s role in how mourn the deaths of celebrities and politicians alike, became more apparent with the death of the King of Pop in 2009. When Michael Jackson died, “Twitter and Wikipedia reported service outages as users flooded the sites looking for new information.” The same could be said for AOL Instant Messaging, which was in decline at the time of Jackson’s death. That was a surprise in 2009. In 2013, it is the norm for Twitter. In fact, the deaths of several celebrities, including Amy Winehouse, were reported on Twitter before the major media outlets could report on their deaths. This trend as sparked other media outlets to take notice and even report news based upon what Twitter has reported. Unfortunately, the use of Twitter can often be unreliable, especially with spam and Internet trolls.
See Charlie Warzel, How Twitter Took Over Death, BuzzFeed, Apr. 8, 2013.
