Blog 9: Twitter

In today's world, social media such as Twitter and Facebook are taking society by storm. It gives the public the opportunity to express there thoughts and feelings on any given subject. Like many new innovations, everything has its good and bad. Sites like Twitter and Facebook have greatly affected people to become there own journalist, and depending on how individuals use it this technology will ultimately determines the outcome of it being good or bad.

The good that comes from sites like these is that it allows people to instantaneously post real time events for the world to know. It provides many different points of views on a particular subject and have the potential of many audiences participating in the matter. It could be use as eyewitness accounts worldwide without the editing of the mass media's involvement or government cover ups. Take for example the Iranian election from The New York Times. The article states that hundreds of thousands of demonstrators show defiance toward the presidential election in Tehran. With the help of Twitter and Facebook, Iranians twitted and posted eye witness accounts of what was really happening during the election. Although the government tried to censor these sites, there were still many other loopholes of getting the information out to the world to read. Sites like these makes it useful for journalist to get important information out to the public as fast as they could type it. However, these sites are not always good

As a matter of fact, incidents such as the supposed 'off the record' comment from President Barrack Obama's interview on ABC News and his thought about Kanye West's interruption of Taylor Swifts acceptance award, was disseminated when he called him a 'jackass'. Posting something has many issues involved such as verification issues, rumors, misinformation especially during breaking news, government censorship, propaganda, fake accounts, bad intentions to slander and many more.

Some questions arise as to placing a limitation on journalism when using these sites, but I believe that these sites give good opportunities for journalist to share to the world the truth about the subject matter. However, the thing that it should be limited to is using this technology with the intentions of instigating a lie from the truth. I would recommend using the technique of judging a reliable website to a post by looking for an attribution, any authority support, what is the objectivity, and how current is it. Because these days, anyone can put anything online, it is up to the reader to be the journalist now in finding the truth of the matter.