For the past six years, since March 2006, Twitter has been booming all around the world to spread news and also personal information with millions of people. It allows users to share text posts with their followers in 140 characters or less, known as “tweets.” The social networking site is used every day to spread news to the world, especially during presidential elections and reforms in various countries around the world.
In June 12th, 2009, Iranians began a protest because they did not like the leadership of their current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was known to have terrible economic policies and have no respect for the human rights of the citizens of Iran. His opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a reformist and progressive leader, was favored more by the people. When the results were released and the public found out that Ahmadinejad was elected as their new president, Iranians began to protest claims that the ballots for Mousavi were not accounted for in the election.
The protest was reported on Twitter nonstop, and citizens would express their complaints and unhappiness with the election and president. Surprisingly, Iran has the most bloggers per capita than anywhere else in the world. The social networking site was also used to plan protests around the country and also get the perspective of civilians participating in the protests, thus also raising awareness. This way, the entire world was informed of the hardships and complaints of Iranians. Many Twitter users would also use #iranelection or #iranprotest so other users could track their posts using Twitter’s “Trending Topics” feature. Due to the mass tweets about the protests, it was named “The Twitter Revolution.”
“The Twitter Revolution” is similar to the recent Kony 2012 outbreak, which got more than 84 million views in less than one month. The video created by Invisible Children went viral on Facebook, another social networking site. From my own experience of seeing the video go viral, more than 60 of my friends on Facebook shared the video on their timelines. After the first 20, I decided to watch the video myself, but unlike most of my friends, I didn’t share it because I knew that everyone would have already seen it. Unfortunately, the video was not what everyone thought it was, therefore it allowed for the creation of rebellions on the video and the charity.
Social networking can be a positive invention in the world of technology, but also a negative one as well. Although you can view other people’s perspectives on what is going on, some of the information that is shared may not be true (as it is the same for Wikipedia) – they are not completely reliable sources. In our current world, it’s hard to know what is real and what’s not.