Social media & social justice in the wake of Ferguson

If you’ve consumed media this week, listened, read or watched the news, no doubt you’ve followed the events in Ferguson, Missouri, where a grand jury declined to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the shooting death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown.

The protests that followed that decision and rippled out across the country tell a story about how we consume and communicate the news today.

The Ferguson story was first told on social media, and those same social networks have been a powerful tool — both for sharing, and not sharing, information.

Zeynep Tufekci, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina and a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, joined Marketplace Weekend to talk about these contradictions. Click play above to hear our discussion.