Trial By Twitter Analysis

The article “trial by twitter” written by Ariel Levy really interested me because of the topic it was on. Almost everybody in the twenty-second century is using social media and it plays a big part in most people's everyday life. People use it to share what they are doing or even just to communicate. It is a way for people to connect without there having to be in person interaction. This can sometimes be a good and even sometimes a bad thing. Social media can tribute both positive and negative effects to the process of an investigation. In the article I read, “Trials by Twitter”, they use social media to acquire evidence and complete their investigation. The whole situation started when a sixteen year old girl from West Virginia went out to …show more content…
She started to find pictures and tweets online about what had happened that night. There was even a picture of the girl who had been raped and people were posting things like “Whores are hilarious” (Levy). Alexandria Goddard had an old cop friend and decided to give all the evidence to her, she even posted it all on her blog. (Levy) After the cops investigated using the evidence from online and a lot of protests happened through the town, they had the trial. With everything being online though with social media, the press and news channels blew up for the trial. It ended up boiling down to only two football players getting tried as juveniles, Trent and Ma’lik. There was no specific or hard evidence that Ma’lik had done anything wrong, he even apologized to the family and cried. Ma’lik got one year in juvenile detention and Mays got two, Mays also had to register as a sex offender (Levy). …show more content…
I found that it can be good because everybody is using it and teenagers will talk about what is happening on it. They use it everyday and will post pictures and videos, which could be useful in a police investigation. I found it could also be negative because everyone can see it and it blows up on the internet sometimes. In this case with it all being online the girl who was raped became exposed and everybody knew who she was. In a way I think that it can be good for the investigators to use but can hinder the investigation too.
One of the reasons why I chose this article is becuase I found it very interesting and well put together. It was an article that made me want to keep reading and see how everything turned out. It was made for an audience that like to read something interesting orhave opinions on this kind of topic. There was a lot of research done by the author and I found it very well explained. The author did a very good job about giving background information and detail. I also think that the author’s overall article was really good and they did a good job on explaining the important