May 12, 2008 marks the date when an earthquake in the Wenchuan County in the province of Sichuan hit China. This was China’s deadliest earthquake since the 1976 Tangshan earthquake. The Sichuan earthquake left devastating consequences leaving 69, 197 dead, 374, 176 injured, 18, 222 missing, 4.2 million homeless.
When a natural disaster such as the Sichuan earthquake takes place, media networks and journalists have to first find eyewitnesses and reporters at the scene. They then fact check the information and edit out the irrelevant details and then report back to people. This process can take a while.
Twitter served as the fastest and most efficient source to get updates on the Sichuan earthquake. Survivors from the disaster were tweeting in information. The sources seemed reliable as the tweeters were on the scene of the event and seemed to know more information than any of the other networks on television.
Robert Scoble an American blogger and author said “when I couldn’t find any news of the earthquake at CNN or Google News, I went to tweetscan, which allows you to monitor Twitter discussion by keyword.” Survivors would constantly update the people interested in the earthquake. Ana from Wenchuan County tweeted in at 12:21 AM “breathing normal again. Feeling an earthquake from the 31st floor was not fun.” Twitter was able to spread insight from locals faster than old media.
A lot of the tweeters happened to be tweeting in Mandarin making it impossible for foreign tweeters to understand what was going on in China. People turned to GoogleTranslate for fast and efficient translations for their tweets. Newspapers and broadcasters could not translate and convey information at this speed. People didn’t have to turn to old media; they could just login on twitter and translate tweets for themselves instead of waiting on old media to deliver the information.
However, the credibility of these tweets can easily be questioned. Anybody is able to tweet in at any time. The information is not always reliable, as we do not know who is tweeting in. The credibility of old media is not as questioned. Old media has a whole team of professionals working to make sure that the information they send out is correct and credible. Information is always fact checked and edited but this takes time. Twitter is the best source to receive information quickly.
In the People’s Republic of China Internet censorship is strongly conducted under laws and administrative regulations. The Chinese government wants to censor media and have total control over the flow of information on the Internet. However, civilians have found their own ways around government restrictions. They usually log on through virtual private networks to go around the censors. Most of the civilians that were tweeting in were using a proxy server where they are able to request service to the Internet from a different service.
The Sichuan earthquake represents how effective social media is for spreading fast information. Twitter was able to beat all the established networks in giving out information regarding the earthquake. Twitter is a great source through which people all around the world can interact and share information.
-Hajra Kath