CHICAGO (AP) — A professor at Columbia University in New York has studied the Twitter behavior of a fatally shot 17-year-old girl who Chicago police say was a gang member.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports Columbia University associate professor Desmond Patton published the study earlier this year with four co-authors. About 400 tweets from Gakirah Barnes’ account and more than 2,100 tweets by her followers in the weeks preceding and following her April 2014 death were examined.
Patton said he is working with Cure Violence in Chicago to come up with a system to analyze menacing Twitter gang messages and alert outreach workers so that real violence can be prevented.
Chicago police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told The Associated Press Monday that Barnes was a gang member.
