Twitter

There are a few interesting stories on the daily mail today to do with social media and law regulations. One relates to hate speech with a student tweeting offensive comments and the other is about picture sharing social networks breaking copyright law.

It highlights the problems and issues surrounding internet regulation and how it should be controlled.

Maybe a couple of good examples for law essays and exams!

All right. So I know the politics of a country thousands of miles away might not be so interesting as this week’s Euro tantrum or Jeremy Clarkson’s most recent politically incorrect statement, but as journalists we should know a little bit about everywhere. So here go my two cents about the current state of digital media in Mexico. But first a little bit of history.

Type in “politicians” into Google and “politicians on Twitter” comes up as the top search suggestion. Twitter is a website for people to post about their hobbies, and to tell their followers what they had for dinner, and anything else that would be too trivial to have a real conversation about. It should not be used to host controversial debates, especially when the ‘tweeter’ has keep their argument to 140 characters.

Twitter and I weren’t best friends to begin with. I was initially frustrated by the 140 character limit, confused by the retweet button and totally mystified by the use of hashtags. It just seemed an overly complicated Facebook.

But after a year of perseverance, Twitter and I are best friends. I now check it at least once a day, exhaust the 140 character limit and I have got the retweet and hastag features off to a tee. Facebook is now very much on the backburner too.

With Twitter emerging as great source for rapid and concise news, many of the nation's journalists have taken to the social networking site and now use it both an outlet aswell as a source for information.  I found an interesting piece by BBC reporter, Philippa Thomas on how Twitter transformed her coverage of the Stephen Lawrence trial. 

Read here

Twitter and YouTube users’ disgust has drawn swift attention to the appalling racist behaviour of a woman on a Croydon tram today. In a video called My Tram Experience a woman with her son on her lap is shown swearing and insulting fellow passengers. She shouts at them: ‘My Britain is f--- all now,’ and ‘Go back to Nicaragua, or wherever you come from.’

Social media helped the matter to come to the attention of police who arrested the woman today.

"Is this a landmark moment for free speech online, with Twitter handing over confidential details of a user for the first time?" asks Rory Cellan-Jones, after Twitter's release of user information in a Californian court to lawyers acting for South Tyneside Council.

 In the last few weeks, I've seen more super injunctions than I have easter eggs. In fact, the courts seem to be dishing them out in such a manner you wonder if they have indeed confused these binding laws for egg-shaped confectionary.

But with today's news that a user on Twitter has revealed most of the names that have been quietly associated with recent injunctions, it seems a few journalists have taken the 'sod it' approach to reporting on these stories.

The media is undergoing a revolution in which people will no longer look to newspapers for news, according to Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow.

Delivering the third Bob Friend Memorial Lecture at the University of Kent on Friday night, Snow said events in the Middle East demonstrate the benefits of social media websites but also that newspapers are becoming dated very quickly. Leaders in Tunisia and Egypt have been forced from power after mass protests driven by services like Twitter and Facebook.

Snow said: "I don't think people will look to newspapers for news. I don't think people are patient enough to read news in that way."

Before his lecture, titled ‘From film to Twitter – the media revolution: is the golden age of journalism come or gone?’, Snow presented this year’s winner of the Bob Friend Memorial Scholarship, Tania Steere, with her award.