Challenging respect and social norms for the dead through reactions to high-profile deaths on Twitter

This research aims to explore reactions to high-profile deaths in the social media platform Twitter, with two main research questions at its core. Firstly, what type of responses to high-profile death manifest in the social media environment of Twitter? And, in the age of social media, what is the current relationship between social media and mainstream news coverage? A thematic analysis of Tweets collected from six cases of high-profile death was conducted, covering a range of types of deaths. The data reveals two core themes. Firstly, what has been conceptualised as ‘unnegotiable sympathy’ - an inflexible, almost compulsive display of sympathetic response, no matter how the death occurred or the characteristics of the individual. ‘Bad’ deaths appeared to garner higher levels of sympathy than those considered ‘good’, suggesting fear of suffering ‘bad’ death a factor for these compulsive sympathetic responses. Secondly, this research considers how the online social media environment is a separate social space with its own unique set of norms, values and behaviours, observed through discussions around high-profile death on Twitter. Social media’s relationship with news media is also interrogated in this research through the online Twitter reactions to high-profile deaths, allowing an observation into how social media both helps and hinders news media in the current age of social media.