Identity Politicization After the Kirk, Tumbler Ridge, and Montreal Shootings

Points saillants

• Shootings are increasingly understood online through identity framing, rather than the facts of the event itself. Across the three shootings we assessed, engagement with online content related to shootings concentrates disproportionately on identity frames (gender, ideology): identity-framed content earns a far larger share of engagement than its share of posts, at the expense of informational content and facts about the shooting itself. For the recent shooting in Montreal, discourse surrounding the gender of the responding police officer received disproportionately high engagement, instead of details about the shooting and shooter.
• Influencers and news outlets engage in identity framing in different ways. Influencers play the key role in amplifying identity frames — they supply 98% of the engagement with identity-politicizing content across the three incidents, with American accounts alone supplying 88%. News outlets are divided in their editorial direction: while most outlets focus on informational updates, a small set of outlets concentrates roughly half of its coverage in interpretive identity frames, and that content earns them more engagement than their own informational posts. Total news engagement is nonetheless directed predominantly to accredited news outlets providing breaking-news coverage — but that audience is highly concentrated rather than broadly distributed: five viral TikTok posts account for 52% of all the engagement accredited outlets' informational coverage drew.
• Platform design incentivizes identity-framing content and graphic footage. Across the three shootings, identity-oriented and graphic content earned substantively higher engagement than informational content, emerging as a predictable output of current platform incentive structures. Unless platforms change how graphic content is moderated and monetized, subsequent tragedies are likely to follow these patterns.