The online reaction to Tuesday’s verdict in the Casey Anthony case was fast, furious and angry.
The high-profile case, which has been covered exhaustively by cable news networks for the last three years, was broadcast on television and online and news organizations like CNN.com and ABCNews.com saw spikes in traffic in conjunction with the announcement of the verdict.
Mashable reached out to NM Incite, a Nielsen McKinsey company and social analytics company Topsy to gather some information online reaction to the case itself.
In terms of pure sentiment reaction, Nielsen tells us that 64% of users on Twitter disagreed with the verdict, 35% were neutral and only 1% agreed with the verdict.
This coincides with Topsy’s data, which shows a switch in sentiment in case-related tweets — from positive to overwhelmingly negative, when the not-guilty verdict was announced.
Nielsen also broke down the tweets into various categories and topics.
Here, you can see that half of the users on Twitter disagreed with the verdict. Disbelief and death wishes for Casey Anthony were also common opinions.
Nielsen’s NM Incite data backs up the increased traffic to various news websites. Nielsen attributes 12% of info sharing tweets to general news link sharing.
Thanks in part to a tweet from Kim Kardashian about the verdict, OJ Simpson references were frequently cited. Kardashian’s father, the late Robert Kardashian, was a member of Simpson’s “Dream Team” in his 1995 murder trial.
I frequently saw humorous references to the television show Dexter and its protagonist, serial killer serial killer Dexter Morgan, in my Twitter stream and Nielsen’s data notes that as well.
ABC News Digital tells us that it saw a significant spike in web and video traffic following the verdict. Visits to ABCNews.com jumped five times the average for that time frame from the previous month, with video traffic three times the previous month’s average. ABC News says that 1.2 million videos were streamed on its website between 12:00pm ET and 4:00pm ET on Tuesday, July 5, 2011.
ABC News also says that 1,000 tweets were sent with the hashtag #ABCCasey and that Facebook page views were up 45%.
Representative of a New Era
Over the last 24-hours, I’ve seen a lot of references and parallels to the OJ Simpson case. To be clear, the cultural significance of this trial doesn’t even come close to approaching OJ-levels, but the prolonged level of media attention, as well as the disparity in media coverage with the jury’s verdict, makes it easy to compare.
What strikes me as most interesting in this context is not the similarities between the trials themselves, but the differences in how the information is disseminated.
In 1995, most viewers watched the OJ verdict on television. I was in the 7th grade and remember watching it live in school. Similarly, I know that elementary schools also broadcast the verdict. The reaction to the verdict took place in person, via traditional media like television, talk radio and in the newspaper.
Sixteen years later, the traditional media was still a catalyst in the early Anthony coverage, but much of the conversation has shifted to social networks.
My colleague Emily Banks made a brilliant observation yesterday when she noticed that many local newspapers updated their Facebook pages with news on the verdict before updating their site homepages. She went on to remark, “Facebook is the new newspaper front page.”
I think she’s right. The Casey Anthony trial will be studied as a cultural phenomenon in the future for a variety of reasons, but I hope that someone in academia will study the shift to the Internet and social media as not only the source of news, but the primary reaction zone for these kinds of stories.
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