Violence and Social Media

The use of social media differs according to the socio-cultural, demographic and psychological aspects of individuals. People chat, share ideas and visual material, and feel that they satisfy their needs of belonging along with the groups they have joined. Social media is not only a domain of freedom where individuals express themselves overtly or secretly, but also an area where several ways of violence emerge or even a means used for some aspects of violence. Being an interactive medium and addressing quite a large number of users, social media issue has become rather sophisticated and problematic. As for the elements of violence in social media, the sites for women and child porn, visual material including excessive violence, campaigns of abuse towards certain people and institutions as well as black propaganda, attributing negative aspects, misdirecting people by assuming fake identities, different ways of theft in social media might be pointed out. The purpose of this study is to assess the media coverage regarding the news in which social media and violence coincide. Therefore, regarding the purpose of assessing the media coverage pertaining to the news in which social media and violence coincide, the news in three Turkish newspapers, namely, Zaman, Posta and Hürriyet have been examined with content analysis method for a three-month period, between November 1st and February 28th, 2014. The respective sampling was determined according to the highest circulation rate. The news have been examined according to the ratio of news coverage, news topics and news actors and the data obtained was processed quantitatively.