Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Twitter users, bare with me. It’s not how you use Twitter that bothers me — it’s how you’re being used on Twitter.
I am not a Twitter user. I am plenty aware, though, of its uses and appeal from friends’ descriptions, stories of Ashton Kutcher’s tweet cult and lampoons on “The Soup.” What doesn’t appeal to me is how news organizations are using Twitter users as a way for people to watch the news.
When the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum shooting happened, a news-savvy friend informed me that CNN was broadcasting tweets about the shooting at the bottom of the screen. One of the tweets read: “what is an 87-year-old doing with a rifle!?!?”
If the Twitter user would have taken the time to actually read the story, he or should would have known that the suspect is 88 years old, but that’s not the point. I want to know why CNN is broadcasting false information.
Most likely, it’s to get Twitter users more “connected” to the news. Thus, more people will watch the news to see if their tweets get airtime.
This theory is a wash. According to an April 2009 Nielsen Web analysis, 60 percent of Twitter’s U.S. users don’t return a month later. And though there are no official statistics from Twitter, Compete.com says Twitter has about 6 million users.
I would hate to think newsrooms are determining newsworthiness based on “Twitter-ness.” If 60 percent of users are dropping Twitter like a bad habit, is it worth the risk of perturbing avid news watchers who are watching the news to see more than just their tweets on screen?
Instead of tweets, why can’t local news updates scroll across the bottom of the screen? Or even the weather? Just some kind of useful information would be more stimulating than an opinion from a viewer.
There is a saving grace to this Twitter takeover. On the weekend of June 13 to 14, when Tehran exploded in protests after Iran’s presidential election, another explosion occurred on Twitter. According to a June 14 “New York Times” article, thousands of Twitter users criticized CNN’s coverage of the event. For a time, Twitter users added new tweets criticizing CNN’s coverage at a rate of one per second.
CNN has defended its coverage thus far, but bucked up and got the news ball rolling after that weekend.
Twitter users: You do serve a purpose. You can serve as a watchdog for media outlets, because even they can get lost in the news maelstrom that surrounds them.
But when it comes to commenting on how a white supremacist has killed a security guard, please don’t tempt news networks with inane and false tweets. Just keep it to yourself.
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