This chance encounter on the National Mall that winter afternoon blew up intoa near perfect stormfedbythe kinds ofdivisive social issues roiling thenation.
It seemed as ifeveryone with a Twitter account had an instantopinionas the first video clip, reflecting only a brief portion of the Jan.
In the aftermath, USA TODAY analyzed more than 3 million tweets and thousands of public posts onFacebook,from the moments after the video of Covington Catholic students' encounter with Native American activist Nathan Phillips was posted to President Donald Trump's tweets days later.
The volume and velocity providean illuminatingexample ofhow social media and the news media can be exploited to fueloutrage in a deeply divided country, even as the full picture of an event is still forming.
All it took was a nudge from a fewsuspicious accounts on Facebook and Twitter.Partisan fervor mixed with high emotions did the rest.
Tweet after tweetfed the outrage machine, swiftly condemning the students, who appeared to critics to have surrounded and mocked Phillipsat anIndigenous Peoples March in Washington, D.C.
The ease with which political divisions can be exploited on social media and are then amplified by the news media is a lesson for our time, saysKlon Kitchen,senior research fellow for technology, national security and science policy at the Heritage Foundation.But,Kitchen says, the real problem is us.
The controversy began when observers, such as college student Kaya Taitano, pulled out their phones to film the encounter on the National Mall.
Thata few taps on a screen can cause so much strife and chaos speaks more to thecurrent cultural crisis in the United States than the state of media or social media, she says.
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