Research Connects Drug War Violence in Mexico with Desensitization in Social Media Georgia Tech
go to original March 6, 2014

Amid times of crisis, citizens often turn to social media as a method to share information, make observations and vent. But as a Georgia Tech professor’s research into social media use amid the Mexican drug war shows, posts can reveal growing numbness, or desensitization, during times of protracted violence and stress.

Munmun De Choudhury, formerly of Microsoft Research and now an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, led the research.  Her team’s paper, “‘Narco’ Emotions: Affect and Desensitization in Social Media during the Mexican Drug War,” will be presented at CHI 2014, the leading conference on human-computer interaction. The presentation of the paper, which also earned Best Paper honors, comes soon after the capture of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, considered to be the world’s most powerful drug lord, in Mexico.

The researchers declined to infer an actual causal relationship between drug war violence and social media numbness. But De Choudhury said the results do show a significant correlation between exposure to violence due to the ongoing urban warfare in Mexico and anxiety and post-traumatic stress symptoms gleaned from social media.

“General psychological research has demonstrated that prolonged exposure to violence, whether directly or word of mouth or through media reports, can have lasting and detrimental impacts including emotional numbness or desensitization,” said De Choudhury. “And our research finds that this holds true with social media. Strong psychological markers of desensitization followed rises of violence in the Mexican drug war.”

Read the rest at Georgia Tech

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