Iqra's Method 2- Online Participant Observations

For my second Method assignment I followed the hashtag #OurThreeBrothers. This hashtag rose after three bodies of African American Muslims were discovered in a house in Indiana. It was a homicide in which the police described the three young men: Mohamedtaha Omar, 23, Adam Kamel Mekki, 20, and Muhannad Adam Tairab, 17 were murdered in an execution style. I became interested in this story because it did not gain the attention it deserved and was not mentioned on national news. Instead the story was covered through social media and not surprisingly it only gained attention from a small portion of the audience.
Submerging myself deeper into the issue I observed a number of trends while going through the tweets from February 29 to March 10, 2016. Looking at the tweets I realized that the demographic of the audience was largely African Americans or American Muslims. Many of these people were using the platform in order to draw attention to the issue as it did not receive any coverage on the news. The most common feature of all the tweets was the outrage about how the tragedy was being completely ignored by greater news sources. So there was an urge to highlight the issue in a bottom-up approach by first personally tweeting and retweeting and eventually grasping attention of greater news authorities.
Compiling all these tweets led me to ask myself: “Do we really pick and choose what is newsworthy and what isn’t”? And “Would have this story hit national news if the victims were White Christians?”
Overall, I wasn’t able to find much information on the topic as it was not covered properly and unfortunately did not make the spotlight for obvious reasons. While looking up news sources I found that the issue was covered but it wasn’t treated like it was a big issue which is why people were outraged.