While the media can sometimes blow up small factoids of information, with the recent scare in Louisville, Ky., and the new threat in Denver, Colo., social media is acting as an early warning system for residents.
On Friday, Aug. 15, two high school football teams that have a strong rivalry against each other, were set to meet to play their first game of the season in Louisville. The football stadium was prepared and students were getting pumped up to see their favorite players step on the field when, suddenly, the game was postponed and the game date was changed. As it turns out, someone (or a group of people; the exact source is unknown) produced a flyer for "Louisville's Purge" that was rumored to be happening from 8:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. The threat was severe enough that it caught the media's attention and many bloggers in the Louisville area were live blogging the flyers and planning to live blog the purge that was going to occur.
If you are afraid of scary movies, like me, you may be only slightly familiar with The Purge, a horror film that came out in 2013. In the movie, all crime is legal for 12 hours, including murder, resulting in characters attempting various crimes, and other characters making sure that they survived. This soon to be cult classic movie inspired The Purge: Anarchy, which was released in movie theaters this past July.
It would have been hard to know that a simple horror movie could have been blown up so much and taken seriously by some people. Whether the planned purge in Louisville was a hoax, or not, seems to be just a tiny detail in this continuing saga. Now, there are threats that a purge is planned to occur in Denver, Jacksonville, Texas, and California. It starts to beg the question; could a purge really happen?
Theoretically speaking, if a flyer was created and distributed through social media outlets, like Twitter or Instagram, it could spread like wildfire through smaller communities. People in the communities would be aware of what time this supposed event was going to occur and could even start to take precautions to deal with the possibility of an event of this scale. Whether or not some people would actually go through the actions of a purge is unknown.
In the situation of these supposed events, the media might be over exaggerating what is occurring, but on the other hand, it shows the public something that they might want to be aware of. As a college student, I saw the movie with friends and while it scared the daylights out of me, I never thought that it feasible situation that some of my friends in Colorado might have to deal with. It is even rumored that, since Labor Day weekend is the last holiday weekend of summer, college students are planning "purge parties." As a response to the fliers, and miscellaneous things being published about real life purge events, law enforcement has informed any and all people that fliers, parties, or any actions relating to purge-inspired events shall not be taken as a joke, and could result in serious charges against a person or group of people.
