Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [105]
Janis Krums, @jkrums, a Twitter user on board a ferry that raced in to rescue passengers, took an incredible iPhone picture of the floating plane and the passengers being evacuated. He instantly posted it to Twitter (http://twitter.com/jkrums/status/1121915133) using a third-party service, which hosts photos and tweets a link to them on the user’s Twitter account. The astonishing photo was retweeted and passed around Twitter so quickly that it hit international media outlets within minutes (see Figure 13-12). The Web traffic going to the photo was so overwhelming that TwitPic’s servers temporarily went offline.
Figure 13-12: Pictures of the plane that landed in the Hudson River first ended up on Flickr, Tumblr, and TwitPic, directed by the Twitter users who took them.
Citizen journalists can do more than just observe — Twitter’s immediacy and portability (because of its availability on mobile devices) makes it possible for people to report during the moment, not just afterwards. During the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, Twitter was used to pass word of a blood drive to help victims.
As a part of the citizen-journalism movement, Twitter is helping make the world safer for children. Recently, the number of Twitter-generated #AmberAlerts has risen, and several children have been reunited with their families because of the observations of regular people who cared and paid attention (see Figure 13-13).
Help Find My Child and other similar organizations have also been working on finding lost children through Twitter. Unlike the unofficial #AmberAlerts, which don’t come from a centralized source, @helpfindmychild is an organized international effort coordinated through one office to use Twitter to find missing children.
Figure 13-13: Amber Alert on Twitter for missing children.
Twitter and other forms of citizen journalism are changing the world for the better, but users need to fact-check, credit the proper sources, and flag those twitterers who are inaccurate or worse, deliberately misleading. While Twitter and the rise of the citizen journalist both augment and replace mainstream news, you must be vigilant and ensure that the news you’re spreading is true.
Tweeting accurate info
How do you credit a source on Twitter or assure people that the news you tweet is accurate? As much as possible, offer proof that your news is valid. Here’s how:
Include a link. The most basic thing you can do is link to a reliable source or, if you can’t verify, post the item as a question, asking others to share verification. The BBC learned this lesson the hard way when they posted an unverified rumor during the November 2008 Mumbai attacks. Their page said Twitter was the source but did not link to a tweet that would support or deny its validity. Once BBC had reported the rumor, subsequent tweets linked to the BBC page, and the rumor persisted, where most Twitter rumors tend to die out.
Create a companion blog. In this blog, you have more space to credit the sources of your news. Link to that blog in your tweets. Make sure to go into your blog after you send your tweets and credit each story wherever possible.
Build a network based on trust and continued reliable information. Not only should you make sure that the people you follow and associate with are trustworthy, but you should also be certain that the people in your network feel the same about you.
Don’t underestimate the power of the retweet. The retweet (where one your followers repeats your tweet for the benefit of her own followers) is critical to networking and viral spread. Retweets of your posts give them a level of validity because retweets prove what you say is worth repeating. Most third-party Twitter clients