Why did Colorado shooting suspect avoid social media?

By Doug Gross, CNN July 23, 2012 -- Updated 1930 GMT (0330 HKT) | Filed under: Social Media

Colorado shooting suspect James Holmes appears in court Monday, July 23.

(CNN) -- It's a truth of the digital age. When a person is plucked from obscurity, for good reasons or bad, the first thing curiosity-seekers do is turn to the Web.

Facebook or Twitter. LinkedIn or Tumblr. We expect social media to shed light on a person's personality, especially when, as in the case of Colorado shooting suspect James Holmes, we're trying to explain the unexplainable.

As it turns out, 24-year-old Holmes, who stands accused of killing 12 people and wounding dozens more during a shooting spree at a movie theater Friday, appears to have left virtually no digital footprint. Media and law enforcement investigating the shootings have found no traces of him online, aside from a possible account on Adult Friend Finder, a romantic meet-up site, according to police.

Former colleague shocked that Holmes is theater shooting suspect

It's impossible, of course, to draw broad conclusions about his mindset based on the fact that he didn't share online. But Holmes' lack of an online presence has emerged as a piece of the puzzle for people looking for answers.

 

"We could ask the same questions about the lack of Web presence that we could for anyone who isolates themselves. Was he socially isolated in all senses?" asked Dr. Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center.

"We know that social isolation can amplify the negative consequences of stress and increase the risk of developing psychopathology. Some research has shown that social isolation actually delays the positive effects of activities found to be emotionally beneficial, such as exercise. ... What we don't know is what caused Holmes to have such a break with reality."

Whatever his reasons, the lack of an online presence puts Holmes squarely in the minority among his peers.

About 81% of 18- to 29-year-olds in the United States use social media at least occasionally, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.

And surveys show that college students like Holmes, who was a graduate neurosciences student at the University of Colorado, are even more likely to use the sites.

But Rainie says it would be a mistake to draw a direct line between his decision to eschew social networking and a mindset that led to the alleged violence.

"It's not the norm for someone of this age to have such a limited presence, in any form: no blogs, no profile on a photo-sharing site and things like that," Rainie said. "But it's also a mistake to think the everyone in this age cohort is living every minute of their lives with social media. That's not the case."

Massacre suspect spooked gun range manager

The survey didn't ask respondents for specific reasons that they choose not to engage online. But Rainie said Pew has heard numerous reasons, from concerns about wasting time to privacy concerns to simply preferring face-to-face interaction.

In a Pew survey from November, two-thirds of respondents (67%) said that staying in touch with current friends is a major reason they use social media, and half gave similar importance to connecting with old friends. Only 3% said that finding a romantic partner was a major reason for their of digital networking tools.

"It's certainly an interesting element of his life that (Holmes) had such a limited digital presence," Rainie said. "But it's not necessarily the case that this means anything about the quality of his social world."

Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College of London, has studied the impact of Internet use on mental health. He too says it's impossible to nail down its significance at this point but listed a set of possibilities, from a sense of isolation to distaste for Facebook as an emblem of "the status quo" to something perhaps even more sinister.

"He (possibly) did not want to have any reputation other than for what he was planning to do, like someone who saves himself for the big stage or a single lead role," Chamorro-Premuzic said.

Similar attacks in the recent past have, in some cases, painted a different picture.

Jared Lee Loughner, charged in the January 2011 shootings in Tucson, Arizona, that killed six people and wounded congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was active on MySpace and YouTube, among other online networks.

Anders Behring Breivik was 32 when he killed 69 people, mostly teenagers, at summer camp in Norway in July 2011. Breivik was a prolific blogger who was active on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. He posted a video to YouTube only hours before his shooting rampage.

By contrast, reporters looking into the mindset of Seung-Hui Cho, the 23-year-old student who killed 32 people and wounded 25 others in an April 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, found almost no traces of him online.

Shooting survivors recount Colorado movie theater horror

The lack of a digital footprint for Holmes has created some unpleasantness for an unexpected group: people who share his relatively common name, live in the area of the shooting and do have a Web presence.

"It amazes me how insensitive, heartless and just plain old IGNORANT some people are in this world," a different James Holmes, this one a fitness instructor who, like the suspect, lives in Aurora, wrote on his Facebook page. "In the last 24 hours I have received hate mail, racist remarks, and sexual advances. I have over 400 friend requests in which a quarter of those are ppl mocking the real killer to gain attention and this was all AFTER the identity of the real killer was revealed ..."

James P. Holmes, who lives in the Denver area, left a similar note on Facebook, albeit in a more wry tone.

"I am not a 24-year-old gun-slinging killer from Aurora, I am a 22-year-old book-slinging mass eater from Littleton ... ," he wrote. "James Holmes happens to be a pretty common name, surprisingly, so try not to jump the gun. Regards, A different guy named James Holmes."

With few, if any, conclusions to draw, Rutledge said the most interesting observation about society as a whole may be how surprised we are that the suspect did not use social media.

"It's a testimony to how normal participating in the social media world is when we look at the lack of presence as an anomaly," she said. "(We wonder,) 'What's wrong with this guy that he's not at least on Facebook?' "

Social media is lying to you about Burma’s Muslim ‘cleansing’

July 19, 2012

Don't you wonder sometimes, that the information we are being fed on daily basis can be untrue entirely or exaggerated to the point where it loses all its truth? PHOTO: REUTERS

Social networking sites are abuzz with news about Muslims being killed in Burma.You can see the sporadic posting of pictures by different people with captions like ‘Muslims killing in Burma’, ‘Muslims slaughtered by Buddhists in Burma’ and so on.
Thus, I took on the mission to sort the truth out for myself once and for all and researched some pictures that I felt were dubious. Below are a few pictures and their original copies. You can evidently see the gross difference between them and how they are thrown out of context.
This was a picture shared on Facebook.


I have found the original version which reads differently to the the one posted on the social networking site.

This picture was taken in 2010 after an earthquake in China and captures the efforts put in by the Tibetans to help rescue the victims. Now, Islamic political parties and some other elements are sharing this image as Muslim killing and their slaughter in Burma.
Another widely circulated  picture captioned “More then 1,000 people killed in Burma” is also fake.

The original, as you can see below, is taken in Thailand in the year 2004. This picture shows protesters that were tear-gassed outside the Tal Bai police station in Bangkok. This is roughly 1,409.9 km away from Burma! What is grossly negligent about these photos is the factual ignorance of the hate these misleading photos can culminate.

Below, please find another image which was posted online, this time with an imprint of Jamaat-e-Islami on the top left . It reads ‘Terrorists of Budhism of Burma kills 500 Muslims’.
As you can guess, this is also a fabricated picture.

In reality, this image belongs to a Human Rights violation incident by the Thai authorities against the Rohingya ethnic minority of Burma. These refugees were detained for a few weeks and then sent off drifting into the sea.
Here is another instance of such fallacy spreading across the social media sites regarding the massacre of Muslims in Burma.

This picture is extremely misleading considering that the original image was about the riots in Thailand that took place in 2003!
Now, take a look at the image below and observe how it is blown out of context.

Now, view the original.

The original picture is not even remotely close to what the picture above states. In fact, a Tibetan protester had set himself on fire in protest prior to the arrival of Chinese president Hu Jintao and that too in Delhi.
I do not deny the killings of Muslims in Burma – not even for a minute.
I think it is horrific and I am sympathetic towards the immense loss being suffered by my Muslim brothers and sisters abroad.
What I am against is being lied to.
Imagine the amount of lies we are being fed through these pictures. How can one trust any image online if such drastic manipulation and editing is being done to cater to someone’s political or personal agenda?
Social media and networking sites, if used properly, can be an impressive tool in spreading awareness amongst its users, but it can be an equally dangerous median as well if misused.
These images are false and are only igniting hatred and prejudice in our youth.
We need to become more vigilant and aware of the credibility and authenticity of  pictures we browse through. It only takes one wrong image to push us over the edge towards extremism.
Who do you think is more misleading?

http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/12867/social-media-is-lying-to-you-about-burmas-muslim-cleansing/