Introduction:
Twitter is known to be grounds where many beliefs and ideas are communicated with much freedom and without much intention of being politically correct. Currently, shock comedy is at a rise and laughing at one's pain is a common occurrence on the site, so when a world Icon passes away how exactly do the Tweeters react? The intention behind the tweets can always differ vastly from attempting to make humor out of a situation in which humor shouldn't be found or persuading others with elevator style tweets offering minimal information behind their strong beliefs/position. Altogether, the algorithm is something that always focuses on what is trending or what is being talked about and will serve as a useful tool to understand the Users overall interactivity with the tweet handle.
As we all know the death of the Duke of Edinburgh has caused quite a social media uproar, especially on Twitter and amongst Prince Philip conspiracy theorists who genuinely believed he was a bad person. The reception of the news varies from twitter user to twitter user with some sending out their genuine respects towards the deceased while others jokingly post about his time on this Earth coming to a blissful end at the ripe age of 99 years of age. As we continue on from his death that occured on April 9th 2021, the tweet #PrincePhilip and #RememberingPrincePhilip was at once on twitter's trending page but remains active as people continue to voice their opinion on the Duke and this raises the question; How exactly did those mourning react to the death of their icon? What type of interactions did we have amongst the grieving/remembering community? What was the overarching goal behind the message posted on twitter.
A respectable example of a disrespectful tweet
One thing expected under these twitter posts is a lot of Gripe due to the unpopular standing of the Royal family amongst social media outlets. With recent social standings, many British taxpayers believe that the royal family live an incredibly privileged life with money that could quite honestly be going to better things. Not only do they believe that they take more than they deserve, many perceive the Royal family to be egotistical figures who hijack events by making it about themselves. Many British communities are hounded by Pro-Monarchy propaganda that is churned out by the Royal family themselves to shed themselves in a good light but on social media pages the only thing that influences the reached audience is the amount of interaction and retweets the post has, and the more conflicting information is revealed the harder it is for the Royals to maintain this ideological superiority they have placed since the early ages.
Method
The areas in which these tweets can be coded under may vary from the content posted by the users, but the categories it could fall under is Nationalistic connection, Remembrance, or simple grievance for the Queen? The content of the tweet will determine what category it will be coded into but an important thing to keep in mind is the users position towards the subject matter. Different types of users could be Political commentators or politicians themselves (such as Sean Hannity or Barack Obama for example) or people with celebrity status such as athletes or actors or common users. The purpose of finding out the user's position (If possible) is to understand why they would send the tweet in the first place. Was it for common political courtesy? Was it to inform the users of their sadness of the loss of a British Icon?
The next important thing to note is how exactly these users are communicating about the derived topic, whether it be a typed response or a simple retweet. It's important to note what type of audience these messages are reading and by studying the inter relational connection amongst the accounts could assist in understanding the overall communication amongst the grieving community. The goal behind coding these tweets is to get an understanding on how the grieving community can feel as subgroups. These subgroups would be determined by multiple factors, as stated previously. These factors include the users standing in society, popularity, interactiveness via their tweets to determine the overall impact of their message to the masses. What was their overall intention behind the posting? Was it to educate or simply remember who Prince Philip was?
With the struggle of finding Positive remembrance behind Prince Phillips name with the #PrincePhilip handle, a more popular figure such as the Queen will be involved in the search to increase the amount of tweets that have been interacted with via means of retweet, likes, or comments. The essential survey of the post will ask if the main idea behind the remembrance transferred to a sympathetic gesture to the queen, or if it remained on the Topic of the death of the Prince.
For the topic of nationalism, the user's location is one thing that will be noted of to determine if these supportive ideals stem from home or from another location in the world. This will help figure out global influence this topic has, and how those around the world react to British patriotism. Grieving can be an international occurrence, but how important are these British ideals behind the user to communicate their support behind them?
The main goal overall is to access the grieving users roots behind the feelings towards his death, to understand the current algorithm of tweets on the subject matter. 3 different hashtags will be evaluated to concur with the level of bias each one could contain. The hashtags for Prince Philip will be considered amongst the hashtags in remembrance, but the solid ground to find the tweets will be #PrincePhilip to be able to ratio the amount of coded tweets taken from each handle and essentially come up with a data analysis that allows us to understand the dynamics and current consensus of the central message behind each grieving users tweet towards the death of Prince Philip within each hashtag. After coding the data, the findings will help us determine how users communicated in wake of the death of a British Icon.
Literature Review
Although many might be making memes and poking fun at the grim event, it isn't to say that Twitter users are taking and berading every source of bad news that they can receive. When western society loses an icon, depending on their role in society will result in the grieving process they will receive on twitter. As Mahler states in his article, The social media obituary is still evolving, its prominence rising in tandem with the growth of the medium and advances in technology. Twitter wasn't the site we knew today compared to when pop icon Michael Jackson passed away, but when comedic actor Robin Williams had been reported to have commited suicide the Twitter world had gone into a momentary shock. When this occurred, waves of positive remembrance posts were being tweeted and posts from celebrities such as Steve Carell was retweeted 63,276 times. This shows that Twitter does have a soft spot for celebrities who they felt made society a much better place, what made Prince Philip so different? He was a British Icon infamous for his racist, sexist, and degrading comments that made him an unlikeable figure in many aspects. Twitter is well re-known for its active social justice warriors and posts are expected to be received with some sort of retaliation.
The grieving process is one that normally is practiced in private, but research suggests that social media has reconfigured grieving due to social media platform features that allow for persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability. In short, Social media has placed a new form of communication towards the grieving process that doesn't really depend on direct communication, it's the indirect messages intended to show support towards the subject can prove to help with the process to allow those going through it that people care, but don't need to engage in any direct way to take this form of backing through the media pages. People craft their identity and express their feelings in front of multiple and invisible audience, so whether they are grieving or being a troll, someone who instigates conflict or arguments in an online social community. Twitter is used to communicate the users experience towards the subject at hand, whether it be direct or indirect but its availability to spread messages to the masses with relative ease make the platform to be inundated with an overarching array of emotions that's viewership depends on one's direct branch of likes and followers. In short, if one likes and retweets posts that celebrate his death in a comical way, chances are your Timeline will be filled with similar posts alongside other similar (but different) media you could be interested in. On the other side of the spectrum, if the user chooses to follow more of the grieving side of the topic, chances are their media will surround this as well.
Another important factor to keep in mind when thinking of Twitter is that the basic measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet, so when sharing a specific thought it is done with the intention of getting approval from strangers when the media is retweeted by its respective random parties. Twitter is one of those few social media platforms whose media has no dependency on the relationship between the Original poster and its responder, and this form of sharing information can relate with the popularity of the tweet at hand. If one retweets the media, chances are that they agree with the media shared and the more traction this form of media gains, the higher chances it has to 'inspire' other Tweeters to post similar content to receive the same amount of online clout received by a similar idea. Bad news tend to gain more popularity and the death of Prince Philip can fall under those types of news outlets, but the truth is the overall attitude towards the death of Prince Philip is one that can be attested to be oddly mixed. Many celebrate while many mourn, but those who seemingly make a mock of the situation tend to gain more traction for the bizarre nature of the topic at hand. This leads to a complicated interaction that some of these handles could have, such as the use of bots with the intent of increasing post popularity by means of retweets from fake accounts.
To reiterate, Twitter is not home to Apathetic social media users who thrive in the desolation of society but instead serves as a 'No filter' view of the world with comments that one would normally not be accustomed to in real life social interactions. The Twitter community has always been one infamous for its out-of-pocket comedy style surrounding taboo topics such as homophobia, racism and sexism and the ability to communicate this behind a screen makes the posting of such information much easier. With this being said, Grieving tended to be a lonely process but sometimes the best form of consolation is getting a pat in the back by that blue bird icon, people feel connected by pain or at least know that other users feel the exact same way, sort of a silent connection amongst Tweeters. This connection, as stated before, has no dependency on any previous social interaction between users, so like/retweet paradigm purely depends on the content and the context in which its being posted. There is a very fine line between hate speech and a controversial topic, and Twitter has always found a way to place itself in between these lines.
Research Question:
Overall Tweets act as a tool to communicate the same message, the death of Prince Philip, but in a different fashion to be able to garner a higher amount of likes/retweets, and by paying close attention to the algorithm in which tweets are presented it can be assumed which ones rank higher in the grieving community. This begs the question: What type of tweets garnered the most amount of attention? And how exactly did these users communicate amongst the post to further push the tweet? This relationship is important to take note of due to the very fact that it could allow us to understand means of communication.
The most important thing to take note of is the interactions between users to gain an overall understanding behind each type of posting. Other important factors to take note of is whether the Queen is mentioned since although Prince Philip might have not been the most important member of the Royal family, including such a huge name sake such as the Queen of England could greatly increment the amount of interactions the tweet could have. This could also show an important relationship amongst the grieving community behind the necessity of including the Queen and their overall empathy to her seeming desolation.
On the one hand, it's easy to understand where these tweets can originate from but its overall interactivity in the Twitter community can help us understand how the users are offering remembrance to pay respects to a fallen major British icon, first by taking note of who they are. The key components to take away from a user is their overall activity with Twitter, their following and if they are essentially a common user who is communicating ideas stemming from their own beliefs. The lower the amount of activity, the more questions arise such as why exactly did they decide to start posting over the death of the prince and only that?
Data Analysis:
#TheQueen
At first glance, it was very evident that most of the Tweets had the highest amount of interaction was those offering condolences to the Queen due to the Emotionally dire situation she was in, and the image used the most was her sitting solemnly in the chapel with her black mask on. It's easy to understand where the respectful remarks come from, but it's important to also note that most of these posts simply revolve his death and don't offer much thought to the Prince himself, but understandably to the Queen and the hardships she could be going through due to the loss of her husband.
Unpopular Remembrance?
The moment #Thequeen is taken out of the search, popularity for the topic decreased from a couple hundred retweets to none. In #PrincePhilip, the most popular tweets offer some sort of political discourse and not offer many words in comfort to the situation.
#NationalPride
Interestingly enough, it was these interactions which incremented its visibility in the #PrincePhilipFuneral handle, but often times the most important aspect of the posting was to reinstate that although British Royalty could've taken a hit, Brits stand as proud as ever. In this handle, comments were supportive and offered praise, but often times the praise for Prince Philip was over encumbered by the posts content, such as pride for the British army or overall Royalty, not directly Prince Philip.
Overall Data Analyses:
From the very beginning, the #PrincePhilip handle was a difficult one to use on its own due to its current controversy with the recent purchasing of a "Royal Yacht" amongst other controversies. With every 'genuine' condolence tweet came a fishy Original poster due to the lack of interaction and suspiciously low amount of personal activity. This increases the overall popularity of the topic but provides Twitter users with nothing more but mere royal "Shit posts" with the intention of driving topic popularity.
With the combination of #TheQueen to the search, the tweets begin focusing on the funeral and the overall hope for a quick emotional recovery from the Queen, and with these posts the interactions amongst users varies from supporting the users through their grieving process to nullifying their emotions due to the controversial nature of the Royal family. A common interaction amongst these posts was a simple response giving support to the tweet, but nothing much past that. With these posts, many users depended on the emotional connection aspect of the tweet to ignore the elephant in the room of any past conflict the family may have faced.
The final popular form of remembrance, National Pride, was one that was backed by people that had some sort of ideals connected directly to the British nationality or the Royal family themselves, and although many of the Original posters were of British origin many of the Users responding in support for this posts were from country's such as New Zealand or South Africa. This interaction was interesting because these users had some sort of Pride behind these nationalistic posts but a good amount had little to no connection to the British royalty. This showed the extent of where these British influences can lead to a place where there's little to no connection aside social media pages, or twitter on this hand.
Conclusion:
It was very apparent that the most popular form of grieving the death of Prince Philip was a form of sympathy for the Queen. The image of her sitting by herself in the Church Pews can prove to be heart-wrenching for some audiences, some going as far as replying "This is sad but I still don't like them". But many of those who did seem to post in support of the Prince were not popular and there was no interaction between these Tweets. The suspiciously low amount of activity lead to the assumption that a good amount of these users were bots created to increase the overall popularity of the Topic. In many of the tweets attempting to offer some sort of positive remembrance, there seems to be 2 comments for every 13 that argue against the idea that this deserves any of our attention at all.
Many took the main idea of Prince Philip's death with another popular ideal in order to create a popular tweet such as one focusing on their military presentation of the body or how this death is a way to mourn as "A national group", which in a inclusive social media platform such as Twitter can support from any location in the world. It seemed like the Death of the Prince was a conversation many were having with the intent of carrying it to another point rather than sticking to the topic at hand. It was very clear that although the direct intent of these tweets was to offer some sort of grievance towards the topic, many of them often times followed another main point in order to garner more likes such as other important things to focus on rather than the negative perception many might have of the family.
In conclusion, the Duke's death proved to be a difficult one to pay respect towards due to the sheer controversial content of his life when he was alive. Those who didn't ask for respect for the Prince and merely asked to let the Queen grieve were immediately received with replies about how the Royal Family is already full of themselves, and the last thing they would want to do would be to give attention to a topic which many feel was bound to come.
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