Public media such as TV or newspapers, paired with crime statistics from the authority, raise awareness of crimes within society. However, in today's digital society, other sources rapidly gain importance as well. The Internet and social networks act heavily as information distribution platforms. Therefore, this paper aims at exploring the influence of the social Web service Twitter as an information distribution platform for crime news. In order to detect messages with crime-related contents, the Links Correspondence Method (LCM) is introduced, which gathers and investigates Twitter messages related to crime articles via associated Web links. Detected crime tweets are analysed in regard to the distance between the location of an incident and the location of associated tweets, as well as regards demographic aspects of the corresponding crime news. The results show that there exists a spatial dependency regarding the activity space of a user (and the crime-related tweets of this user) and the actual location of the crime incident. Furthermore, the demographic analysis indicates that the type of a crime as well as the gender of the victim has great influence on whether the crime incident is spread via Twitter or not.

中文翻译：

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使用“链接对应法”感知公众对犯罪新闻的反应

电视或报纸等公共媒体与当局的犯罪统计数据相结合，提高了社会对犯罪的认识。然而，在当今的数字社会中，其他来源也迅速变得重要起来。互联网和社交网络在很大程度上充当了信息分发平台。因此，本文旨在探讨社交网络服务 Twitter 作为犯罪新闻信息发布平台的影响。为了检测包含犯罪相关内容的消息，引入了链接对应方法 (LCM)，该方法通过关联的 Web 链接收集和调查与犯罪文章相关的 Twitter 消息。根据事件位置和相关推文位置之间的距离分析检测到的犯罪推文，以及相应犯罪新闻的人口统计方面。结果表明，用户的活动空间（以及该用户的犯罪相关推文）与犯罪事件的实际位置存在空间依赖性。此外，人口统计分析表明，犯罪类型以及受害者的性别对犯罪事件是否通过推特传播有很大影响。