Twitter Blog Post

Twitter has been used far beyond the socializing and marketing aspects of their platforms and there are a couple examples from when this happened.  One example would be in 2011 when the “Twitter Uprising” happened. Twitter was used as a tool in order to coordinate the protests. Many of the protesters would use hashtags such as #Jan25 to coordinate exactly when things were going on. This would have never been possible before to get the amount of people doing the same exact thing at the same exact time without the use of social media. This is why it was so useful in helping a whole entire country because with the use of social media a large amount of information can spread to a lot of different people. Another example would be when the Boston Marathon Explosions happened and it brought out the bad side of twitter. Twitter does its best work in the first five minutes after a disaster, and its worst in the twelve hours after that. This is why during the Boston marathon bombing twitter was good and bad. It was used to get the word out that there had been a bombing that had occurred at the Boston marathon, which is good for people to know, but then after that all of the false tweets that went out about what the details about what happened had things come crashing down. More people were concerned about the race of the bombers and why people had assumed that the people were Muslims. The fact that no fact checking was happening on the tweets and people are retweeting the tweets without any form of background check is what leads to the spread of the lies. Another way that twitter was used was to figure out more about pro and anti-ISIS the tweets were and what the types of tweets do to the people who are looking at them. This way we can look deeper into a way to dampen the ISIS’ social media success. Another way that Twitter was used in a different way was when Houston had the terrible flooding and the phone lines were so backed up and many people were without electricity their only option to reach out for help was through social media. People were tweeting out their condition and their location and this led to many more rescues that happened that had a very good chance in not happening without it. Twitter can be used as a great journalistic tool because it is a way to get a lot of small little bits of information out to as many people as possible. Also twitter has tool to allow people to find the tweets they need and want to see. As well as how easy it is once one-person retweets and tweet then other people who they follow and follow with see their retweet and there is a chance that person could retweet and so on and so forth. The way that twitter can be useful from a political stand point is a similar reason for journalistic as well but it can get to a lot of people very quickly as well as when people who think similarly and are tweeting with the same hashtags and retweeting the same tweets will eventually find each other’s tweets and continue to push the information that they want to see at each other and keep them focused on one candidate. Lastly when talking about organization it works well because again it gets a lot of information out to a lot of people so a lot of people get the information especially if things change or there is a specific thing that needs to be done at the event. Twitter allows for that quick important blurb on the task or event that is occurring. One way that twitter has been used in the past 12 months in ways other than being a social media platform is in 2018 when people in India, 35,000 people to be exact were using twitter to fulfill blood donation requests. The systems that were being put in place can provide support for saving more lives by reducing the gap between blood donors and the people in need. This method worked for the people over there but I am unsure as to how that would work in a first world country, I would think not very good because of how much extra stuff that pops up in people timelines. In March of 2018 when a massive earth quake and tsunami hit Hong Kong. People with a very rare heart problem called pulmonary hypertension and the hospitals were directly contacting 60 patients who then re-tweeted it to over 100 people. Some were unable to make it to hospitals so they had to take the drugs to the patients. This is a huge success for these people having people come together over social media to make it so that everything gets to where it needs to go. One more event where twitter was more than a social media platform was when in January 2019 when Rahaf al-Qunun who had been arrived in Canada after being granted asylum but fighting to no be deported back to Saudi Arabia. She tweets out, “It think the number of women fleeing from the Saudi administration and abuse will increase, especially since there is no system to stop them, I hope my story encourages other women to be brave and free.” The way she is using twitter to rally her idea and to get a lot of supporters, and it works well to do this but there is a down side. Giving herself up to exactly what she is and who she is can point her out and the Saudi government will know exactly what she is about. The three accounts that were followed for the project were Barstool Sports, National Geographic, and Jefferey Star. Barstool Sports giving all the highlight and analysis on sports make it very useful for things related to that. National Geographic being informative out nature but also capturing nature in such an amazing way, its hard not to want to having this type of thing in the twitter feed. Jefferey Star was the account that was supposed to have no interest in at all. The biggest difference between using twitter is that with such a short character count shorts blurb of information are doing so much better in our society today with an ever-shortening attention span, people are gravitating more towards the shorts articles rather than long articles that take longer than a minute to read. Taking this into consideration the length and manor of post on twitter are much different than all other social media platforms.