The Twitter Experience

Twitter is a versatile application that has many ways in which people can utilize it. Many people use it for marketing or to promote their brand. Twitter is however much more valuable than it appears to be. For example, Egyptian citizens used it to coordinate the protests they ran five years ago in the fight for their freedom.

               Twitter was used as an important tool during that time. During the Boston, Massacre Twitter was the first platform to break the news to the world. It gave people safe zones to stay at who were in the immediate location. It kept people informed who were not. The downfall of Twitter during this event is that all the information wasn’t accurate.

               The terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut spread like wildfire due to the amount of exposure Twitter can give. Many of Twitter's influencers or people who have a massive following tweeted about the tragedy which brought it to the forefront of the news.

               During Hurricane Harvey, many people didn’t have cellphone service. They turned to Twitter to receive help and inform the proper authorities where people were. If someone was stuck on a roof on a certain street people would tweet about it for the person to get to safety.

               Twitter is a useful tool, especially for journalism and politics. Journalists have more of an opportunity to become relevant or continue to be relevant in the realm of journalism. They can tweet news or news features before they are released in a newspaper or an online news source. Journalists can also reach a bigger audience through twitter by tweeting the link to their write-ups on twitter.

               Politics and Twitter are a great match. People who do not have time to sit and watch the news on the television, or who want to stay up to date with a quick synopsis go to Twitter. All major media news outlets have a Twitter and tweet daily about anything political. Especially in today’s world with the President spending more than half of his day on Twitter. Something is trending politically on Twitter almost every day.

               Twitter has been the communicator of many events throughout its history this year specifically it has communicated some pretty newsworthy events. Some of them communicated successfully and others not so much. The fires in the Amazon Rainforest were a huge event that was covered and communicated by Twitter. The devastation that occurred and the awareness brought from Twitter's reach and engagement was huge. The event was communicated successfully and brought about multiple ways for people to help the cause.

               Another event Twitter helped communicate was the whistleblower madness involving Donald Trump. It was communicated successfully because it explained how the news was released about a phone call that President Trump had with Ukraine’s national leader Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump admitted to speaking with Zelensky about his upcoming challenger Joe Biden and his son. The call was supposedly about Trump pressuring Zelensky to do something that benefits him, along with issues involving the whistleblower case. Beyond that, there is no other information known at this time about what was said in the phone call.

               There is speculation that Trump is hiding some sort of military information, along with talks of slandering Biden’s name. There is no real rhyme or reason as to why Trump would speak about Biden. Trump claims to have no pressured anyone in the phone call nor spoke on the whistleblower subject.

               An example of Twitter not communicating an event successfully was when 107 women were sworn into the 116th congress. This is extremely important because there is now 4 times the number of women in congress than there was in 1987. This gives hope to women and shows that the nation is moving in a more diverse direction. The reason this wasn’t communicated successfully on Twitter is that no one saw it or tweeted about it.

               The Twitter subjects that were chosen to be followed were ESPN, Rachel Maddow, and DJ Akademics. I chose ESPN and DJ Akademics because I have a huge interest in sports and music. These two outlets do a great job of keeping people up to date on important or notable things happening in the sports and music worlds.

               I chose to follow Rachel Maddow because I don’t personally have an interest in politics especially since Trump became our president. I do realize that she is, however, a great source of political events.

               The Twitter experience has shown me that people can easily contact each other for good and bad reasons. People can stay up to date on current events and receive help in times of emergency. This separates itself from all other apps by being the first social media outlet to receive news and starting a conversation about it.