The Case of a Mass Shooting and Violence-Related Mental Illness Stigma on Twitter

To determine how mental illness (MI) stigma messaging on Twitter manifests after a mass shooting, using the Fort Lauderdale Airport shooting (January 6, 2017) as a case study, we collected publicly available tweets about mental health/illness between December 23, 2016 and January 20, 2017 published from Florida (shooting location) and Virginia (comparison state; N = 38,634). We manually coded 3,283 tweets to build machine learning models to classify the remaining tweets by tweet topic and MI stigma messaging and assessed state-specific trends in these areas. We used logistic regression to determine which tweets were retweeted most frequently after the shooting. Violence-related MI stigma messaging increased sharply in both states (113% increase in Florida (9.8 percentage points), 300% in Virginia (12 percentage points) following the shooting. Tweets containing violence-related MI stigma messaging also had increased odds of being retweeted. Violence-related MI stigma messaging on Twitter increased after the Fort Lauderdale shooting and transcended the geographic location of the shooting event. Violence-related MI stigma messaging also had increased odds of reaching a larger audience, suggesting widespread endorsement of this stigma. This demonstrates a need for advocacy for violence-related MI stigma reduction on social media following mass shootings.