How Instagram and Twitter can help communities to grieve after a terror attack

After Monday night’s atrocity in Manchester 23-year-old pop star Ariana Grande took to Facebook and Twitter to share a message. “Broken,” she wrote. “From the bottom of my heart, I am so so sorry. I don’t have words.”

It was a sincere sentiment. but it was also intended to create a space for others to grieve. At the time of writing there are 42,600 comments attached to the Facebook post: people have used Grande’s post to offer messages of support and condolence both to the pop star and to the families and friends of the victims.

“The grieving process has changed,” says Steve Bartlett, co-founder of Manchester digital marketing agency Social Chain, who has built a business by understanding youth engagement. “This new ‘social grieving’ process takes place online. You have millions of people, all over the world, grieving in one online room.”

This “digital aftermath” followed a pattern similar to that that manifested after the attacks in Paris, Nice and Westminster — each of which sent digital ripples around the world. While the roads around the Manchester Arena came to a standstill online traffic spiked, progressing from initial confusion to panic, then condolence via the hashtag #PrayForManchester and offers of practical support such as #RoomsforManchester, as residents of the city advertised offers of shelter for those stranded in the city centre.

“Every terrorist attack I’ve ever looked at has had a ‘pray for’ hashtag, and it seems as if a digital show of support for the victims is really important. It’s like a digital candlelit signal,” says Carl Miller, research director at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at think-tank Demos.

Cynics might deride this rudimentary empathic response as virtue signalling, but in fact it is an effective means of ad hoc grief counselling. “Finding people who have shared traumatic experiences means we’re more likely to find individuals who can understand our perspective, especially those who have been really personally affected,” says Nathalie Nahai, a web psychologist and author of Web Psychology and the Science of Online Persuasion.

Generation Z, that sharp shorthand for the post-millennial generation, feels like a particularly uncaring catch-all for so many individual teenage fans both at the concert and affected by it, but it does denote a set of characteristics. “I feel like me and my snowflake generation are just better at talking about grief than people older than us,” says a 19-year-old Manchester student. “OK, it’s online, but at least we’re using a medium that lets our friends know that we’re here for them. And yes, that follows through to the real world. It’s like a gateway to opening up.”

For all the burdens that social media load on to teenagers, from low self-esteem to eating disorders, it does have some merits.

Still, it’s a double-edged tool: it is also the medium through which many terrorists have been radicalised and recruited, and a hotbed of deliberate disinformation.

As confusion swirled in the small hours of Tuesday morning Twitter and Facebook users shared fake pictures of supposedly missing friends, while bogus reports of other terrorist attacks circulated — including news of a gunman outside Oldham hospital which was picked up unwittingly by several tabloid websites.

“There’s always been an online subculture of trolling and delighting in trying to get people to believe wrong stuff,” says Miller. Terrorists groups and even state actors can be behind this — Miller points to a 2014 “rumour bomb” set off by Russian trolls on Twitter, in which they successfully spread hoax reports of an Ebola outbreak at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in the USA. In warzones such as Syria inaccurate information spread on social media can be the difference between life and death.

Most often, though, the trolls are regulation keyboard jockeys. “There’s something called the ‘online inhibition effect’, whereby if there is only a computer connecting two human beings they do treat each other differently than they would offline, becoming more disinhibited,” says Miller. “A computer removes a lot of the visual cues that the person you’re talking to is a human being, and that’s one of the socio-cognitive reasons why trolling happens.” It’s a psychological rush to enact a measure of mischief, at a remove from comprehending the real-world consequences. “It’s the digital equivalent of shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre,” says Miller.

This vacuum of visual cues is one of the reasons psychologists think emojis, selfie sharing, and digital avatars are now so prevalent online that they’re a surrogate for face-to-face interaction. They’re also breaking down barriers.

“Brits find it difficult to verbally communicate,” concludes Nahai. “Now people are used to using social platforms and emojis there’s a lot more focus on being able to express emotion without verbally communicating it. That’s something that provides a different mechanism which could bypass the stiff upper lip.”

Follow Samuel Fishwick on Twitter: @fish_o_wick