The Power of Twitter

Originally published in The UCC Express January 7 2014

Before I start this, I feel I should probably admit my bias toward Twitter. Last summer I went on a J1 to San Francisco and suffered the plight of every J1 student. As the saying goes, I had too much month left at the end of the money. One night in particular I had three slices of cheese for dinner, dipped in hot sauce. Naturally, to vent my frustration at squandering my precious dollars on everything but the necessities, I tweeted something inconsequential along the lines of “So hungry, so poor.” Within a half hour, two large pizzas arrived at my apartment door, free of charge. In those interim thirty minutes, a girl named Keira living in Dublin, who I had never met before, saw my tweet, asked me for my address and the address of my nearest Dominos and ordered pizza online, to be delivered to my place in San Francisco, all the way from Dublin. She basically saved me from assured starvation, all thanks to Twitter. I’ve met her in real life since, in the murky Copperface Jacks. I was fairly inebriated and forgot how old I was when she asked me (I’m twenty-two, not twenty-one as I thought), so I imagine I was a bitter disappointment in real life and she regrets sending me pizza.

It might sound like an overstatement when speaking in terms of pizza, but Twitter is powerful. Interestingly, its premise makes it sound anything but. The name itself makes the platform sound trivial, to ‘twitter’ is to make an inconsequential sound, and the idea of saying something of value when confined to 140 characters sounds unrealistic. But the beauty of Twitter is the simplicity of its design. Before you roll out of bed on a Monday morning, you can learn exactly what is happening in the world. In two minutes you can scroll through a series of tweets and become informed about events that are taking place in real time. If a terrorist attack has happened anywhere from the United States to Somalia, you can immediately find eyewitness descriptions, photographs and journalistic accounts. If Ireland score a try against the All-Blacks and you’re missing the match because you’re stuck in traffic, you’ll immediately find eyewitness descriptions, photographs and journalistic accounts. If Jennifer Lawrence falls over while going to pick up her Oscar, you’ll immediately find eyewitness descriptions, photographs and journalistic accounts (and probably a few .gif images to boot). You get the point. No longer are we required to spend lengthy periods reading long-form articles searching for elucidation about what is happening in the world after the fact; now we follow them in real time, and if we’re in the right place at the right time, we contribute to them.

Twitter is not without its critics, but often these criticisms are uninformed and unfounded. The idea of reading about what someone had for lunch in 140 characters or less does indeed sound unappetising, but that’s not what Twitter is for. Many people set up a Twitter account and immediately follow their favourite celebrities only to be disappointed by how uninteresting they are. I did this; I followed Stephen Fry for ages. I have nothing against Stephen Fry, in fact I quite like him, but we don’t share the same interests. When he would tweet about a play he’s doing on West End, I would immediately skip over that tweet because it is obviously of no use to me. The trick to Twitter is to carefully curate who you follow. Personally, my interests lie in American politics and current affairs, so I follow a lot of American journalists and news outlets. If Obama is giving a speech on healthcare reform, all I need to do is search the hashtag #healthcare or #obama as he is speaking and I’ll immediately find real-time reaction to what he is saying. If football is your passion, you’ll find real-time reaction to any given game in real-time by searching the relevant hashtag. This is hugely powerful and informative.

The real-time aspect of Twitter is what drives it. In April of last year, two Chechen brothers exploded two pressure-cooker bombs at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding hundreds. The Boston Globe (@bostonglobe) was the first news outlet on the scene because it was covering the marathon. Its Twitter account, along with the Twitter accounts of its staff members, served as information points for those affected by the bombings. Countless tweets flooding in from several accounts were amalgamated on a live-blog page on the Boston Globe website. With each new snippet of information coming in, Globe reporters could update the Boston public and the wider world about what was happening, and this became more important as the city went into lockdown as the situation turned into a manhunt.

Of course, real-time updates means less time for verification of facts. As a journalistic tool, Twitter can be a double edged sword. During the Boston Bombings event, a missing student named Sunil Tripathi was misidentified on Reddit and Twitter as the culprit, and an online witch-hunt led thousands into believing he was responsible. It turned out not to be the case, and the student was found to have later died in circumstances completely unrelated to the bombings. Reddit subsequently apologised for fuelling the suspicion of his involvement, which had spilled over onto the Twitter-sphere. Furthermore, in April 2013, the Associated Press Twitter account was hacked and reported that the two explosions had occurred at the White House. The account was immediately suspended and statements were released to retract the untrue statement, but the damage had been done. That single tweet, online for only a few minutes, had caused the stock markets in the United States to plummet after giving the impression that America was under attack. Incidents such as these demonstrate the sheer power of Twitter. As a tool, it has immense influence. In the right circumstances, a single tweet can inform, or misinform much of the world.

Now in its eighth year, Twitter has yet to make any money, but it is increasingly obvious that it will remain a mainstay in the social media world. It is often unfairly compared to Facebook, as content on Facebook rarely moves beyond a few hundred friends, whereas content on Twitter can reach millions if the tweet is interesting or relevant enough. Facebook is an excellent tool for staying in touch with friends, but Twitter works far better for spreading important information. While my pizza experience was a fluke, and probably represents the kindness of strangers more than it does the power of Twitter, the fact remains that Twitter is immensely influential. It has the power to inform like nothing else ever invented, no matter what your interest.