Been a quiet week hasn’t it?
Well, actually it hasn’t. This was the week that has proved Twitter is not just a new social media fad. In the matter of a few days we’ve had the Trafigura scandal and we had yesterday’s unbelievable and appalling article by Jan Moir about the tragic death of Stephen Gately. Because of it, people using it to spread the word about Trafigura, the blocked information became public. Because of it, the Daily Mail has lost advertisers on their website. I joined Twitter in 2007 in its embryonic phases and even I didn’t expect that it would get this big and this valuable to news.
What’s perhaps worrying for organisations like Carter-Ruck and the Daily Mail is that the momentum is not going to go away. Twitter is no so powerful that it could pretty much create news at any given moments. A world without it would mean that both Trafigura and the Jan Noir article would not have been news. There is also an added legal benefit. As Martin Moore says in his blog yesterday, to stop the people tweeting away is an impossible task:
They (or rather ‘we’, since I twitter and was twittering on Tuesday morning) are mostly individuals, not institutions or outlets. To stop twitterers Carter Ruck would have to take on thousands of individuals – many of whom are tweeting pseudonymously. To use a military analogy, it’s like an army fighting a guerilla rather than a conventional war.
People must stop underestimating this invaluable tool. People who think that incidents like this are examples of a ‘heavily orchestrated internet campaign’ – something than Jan Moir believed the furore was in her forced and non-heartfelt ‘apology’ – are obviously deluded and will never ‘get’ the idea in the first place and will suffer for it. Just like the Daily Mail.
PS – If you haven’t yet, read Charlie Brooker’s utter destroying of the Moir article.
