The Ferguson police chief resigned on March 11th, 2015, following the Justice Department’s report about systematic bias in the Ferguson police department. This prompted protests outside the police department, during which two police officers were shot and wounded.
Using TwitterTrails, we investigated this claim the following morning, about 10 hours after the shooting, and repeated the data collection twice over the next 12 hours to get a larger dataset. We find that, even though we did not collect data live during the event, TwitterTrails can still reconstruct an interesting and meaningful account of the reporting on Twitter. We capture not only traditional news media reporting, but also first hand accounts written by people on the scene of the protest (which contain information that is less visible in tweets written by the news media). Finally, we find a very polarized audience taking to Twitter to discuss the shooting, as captured by the co-retweeted network.
Read on for our observations, or view the story for yourself on TwitterTrails.
