Public perceptions of justification in the deadly police shootings of black men: a content analysis of social media posts in 2016 and 2020

The proliferation of information technologies has revolutionized how people around the world consume news. By 2021, an estimated 8.6 billion mobile subscriptions existed worldwide. In the United States, a majority (84%) of Americans access their news digitally. On social media platforms, Facebook is the most used network for obtaining news. The three major news sources in the United States, CNN, Fox News, and MSNC, have a strong presence on Facebook. The current study analyzes public comments posted on Facebook involving the deadly police shootings of four Black men (i.e., Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Jonathan Price, Rayshard Brooks) to identify reactions at two points in time. Our work centers on public comments to these posts, not the posts themselves. Using a summative qualitative analysis, we analyzed the first 20 Facebook comments from CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC that are listed as most relevant (e.g., highest number of likes, reactions, replies) to the most recently posted news story regarding the incident. This resulted in a sample size of 223 posts. Public comments were categorized as justifying the killing, perceiving the killing as not justified, or expressing neutrality as to whether the killing was justified or not. We found that most comments, regardless of time period, did not engage in victim-blaming. Overall, the majority (N = 139 or 62%) of all comments perceived these deadly police shootings as not justified. Most (54%) posts on Fox News justified this violence, while the majority of posts on CNN or MSNBC felt the police had used excessive violence. There were more negative comments of Black men and victim-blaming after the Trump presidency (in 2020) than in 2016 (before Trump took office), which may be related to the racial rhetoric of the times.