Palestinian toddler and Cecil the lion

I have to admit that I did not know who Cecil the lion was till the news about its death pervaded all my social media accounts.

Out of the blue, all hell broke loose on the Internet with people attacking someone called Walter Palmer. Honestly, when it began, I thought Palmer, who turned to be a dentist from Minnesota in the US, had killed a zookeeper or a veterinarian who was taking care of this lion somewhere in Africa.
It did not take me long to realize that the horrible crime everybody is talking about was the killing of Cecil the lion itself!
Cecil was indeed a beautiful animal; a Southwest African lion that lived in a park in Zimbabwe and was part of a large study funded by the Oxford University which made it a famous animal with a dedicated Wikipedia page telling its story of how it survived along with its brother a fight back in 2009 and how it established its own pride of up to 22 lions. If you think I am making this up, go ahead and search Wikipedia for it.
However, the level of fury and rage that accompanied the news against Palmer, especially on the social media, would make you think that the guy has not only hunted a lion, but attacked a whole African tribe, tortured its women and kids, and set the very last of its men on fire!
He is no longer a man with a mistake, but depicted as the face of evil, ultimate curtly, and a cold-hearted person without a shred of mercy!
It is both baffling and interesting to observe how social media influences its users and their judgments and how they interact and roam around the lines of logic and legal obligations.
It is alarming how an attack on social media could turn into a blind tornado destroying lives and reputations on its path.
In mere seconds after the release of his name, the man in question was bombarded with all possible hate and threatening messages, he closed his clinic and went underground fearing for his life.
“Kill a lion? Go to hell. You deserve to get shot and bleed for several days,” someone wrote him online.
It is interesting to notice that when someone commits a crime against another human being, which I assume you would agree with me is a more serious crime than the one committed against an animal, the accused person would be given the benefit of doubt till evidence is provided and the case takes its course in a court of law.
This is not in the case of Palmer. Apparently, he dared to kill an animal!
Paolo Parigi, an assistant professor at Stanford University who has studied social media, points out that some times people gather around certain topics, sharing views and intensifying feeling toward those topics, they eventually form what he calls “aggregation points.” All of a sudden, there is a community that feels like you,” Parigi says to the Mercury News.
“Someone like Palmer becomes an abstract, an object.”
I am not here to defend Mr. Palmer, and I am personally not in favor of hunting animals in its natural habitat for the sake of fun or sports, but I am only trying to wrap my head around the force of social media and how it can affect or manipulate the public opinion.
I would leave you with this simple comparison: Just two days after the killing of Cecil the lion, a horrible incident took place in the West Bank when a Palestinian toddler was burned to death on the hands of what believed to be Jewish settlers, the hashtag covering the news (#BurnedAlive) was tweeted 3,149 times compared to 731,636 times of the hashtag covering Cecil (#CecilTheLion) according to Topsy at the time of writing this article.
Go figure!