Associated Press had its Twitter account hacked yesterday, and inaccurate tweets posted in its name caused panic and financial turmoil.
The tweets that came from the verified account declared that there had been two explosions in the White House, and that President Barack Obama had been injured.
Looks like the official BBC Weather account on Twitter and @BBCArabicOnline have been hacked. It appears to be another attack by pro-Bashar al-Assad supporters who have hit another Western media Twitter account.
A message has been posted on both Twitter feeds claiming that the “Syrian Electronic Army Was Here via @Official_SEA #SEA #Syria“. Read More
With more than 400 million tweets sent each day and growing fast, its top 10 users, led by Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, have more than 275 million followers alone.
It has worked itself so seamlessly into our lives that now no major event seems to take place without there being some kind of Twitter element, from celebrity break-ups to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the budget.
With talk of an IPO in 2014 and a valuation in the $9-$11bn (£5-7bn) ballpark, it is starting to generate the revenues that at the start people never thought the microblogging service could make and is on course to generate more than $800m (£527m) in 2014. Read More
If you haven’t seen this TEDSalon London talk from last month on the future of news it is well worth your time. In it Markham Nolan of Storyful shares why he thinks YouTube may soon overtake traditional news sources and how this represents a dramatic shift in the dynamics of news media. In his view YouTube, which adding 72 hours of video every minute, is becoming the most important platform of “documentary evidence about humankind in existence”.
He makes a good case for it, particularly as he talks about the war in Syria and how, as traditional news organisations struggle to get footage because of the risks involved, YouTube has become invaluable. Read More
As the fighting in Gaza continues today, with both sides continuing to trade blow, Israel has shown a new side to how it conducts its fight with Hamas as it turns to social media to offer a level of apparent transparency that has not been seen before in the conflict in the Middle East.
We have already seen how important it is to use social media to get your message out in Syria. There both President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and the Free Syrian Army have turned to social media.
The Israeli Defense Force is both liveblogging its operations in Gaza and is very active on Twitter through its @idfspokesperson account, which have been tweeting news, images and videos of missiles being fired into Israel. Read More
A good addition here to the tips for journalists using social media file from the Wall Street Journal.
Social media and journalism have developed a symbiotic relationship evidenced as we reported recently by a study showing many UK journalists say they “can’t work without social media. It is only some on the fringes who continue to argue that social media destroying good journalism. That is simply not true.
You only have to look to how journalists have used it to cover the Arab spring and Syria — that conflict in-particular has been noted as a ‘War Reported by social media and citizen-journalists’.
The tips here while aimed at those working in the media are more widely applicable to many others working in social media. It’s about good practice and that is universal.
This video from Opensite.org is well worth a watch. Put together by a team of designers and researcher with the idea to show the reach of social media and how over the past year or so it has help spark revolutions around the world.
It takes its cue from Gil-Scott Heron’s famous line, that “The revolution will not be televised” and of course he was right. It wasn’t brought to you by brands and NBC certainly could not predict the winner.
Instead, as we have found out the revolution was youtubed, statused and retweeted by social networking sites around the globe with a potential reach of 82% of the global population or 1.2 billion people.
Some interesting examples here of how both sides are using social media in the battle for Syria.
Particularly striking is how Instagram is being used the the opposition to document the fighting.
In the previous Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt and Libya we saw much less of that and more of Twitter and Facebook — particularly in the former. Read More
Dominique Jackson (@deejackson) writing on the Mail Online picks up the social media and journalism debate and points out some of the bad habits she sees journalists engaging in as a result of Twitter.
The piece, ‘Twitter will play a significant and disproportionate role in the coverage of London 2012′ in part looks at what will be the world’s first ‘Social Olympics, from tweeting athletes and the stories that will emerge, but she also talks about the negative impact that Twitter has had regarding the way that the working practices of journalists have changed because of it. Read More
In the latest Nieman Report – Truth in the Age of Social Media – Craig Silverman suggest that – ‘Never has it been so easy to expose an error, check a fact, crowdsource and bring technology to bear in service of verification.’
But although this may be true, do we think that the web has helped to improve accuracy of information we access overall, or not?
Let’s take the example of Encyclopaedia Britannica vs Wikipedia. The former was written by selected, individual experts who created and provided information that was taken as gospel truth for many generations. Of course this esteemed publication was killed off by free access to information on the web. Read More
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