For some people and organisations Twitter has become, at least in part, simply another way of sending out timely news. Issue a news release? Check. Put it on website? Check. Send out tweet with headline and link back to site? Check.
All sounds fairly typical and unexceptional and if you’d asked me a few days ago I wouldn’t have added an exception or caveat to that sort of process, even if it didn’t involve a formal press release or link. If you treat Twitter as an outlet for official, timely news then that’s how you use it. I say “a few days ago” because I instinctively found something uneasy about the news from Utah:
It was a very modern way to announce a very old-fashioned death.
Shortly after midnight in the US state of Utah, Attorney General Mark Shurtleff picked up his Apple iPhone, opened up a Twitter “app” on his handset and began tweeting.
But Mr Shurtleff’s 134-character composition was no ordinary post. This was not a piece of miscellany from the 53-year-old’s home life, a link chosen to amuse or interest his followers, nor even a political prod at his Democratic rivals.
Instead, Mr Shurtleff used Twitter to announce that most important of all things: the death of a human being, convicted murderer Ronnie Lee Gardner.
“I just gave the go ahead to Corrections Director to proceed with Gardner’s execution. May God grant him the mercy he denied his victims,” the attorney general wrote.
You can read the full BBC report here, but what’s your view: is it ok to report any news on Twitter or are there some stories that should be avoided? And if so, what’s the criteria?
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8 Comments
Well I’m against the death penalty, which makes me look askance at almost any action connected with it. To get a measure of where we have a problem with using Twitter, it would be better to use an example where more of us approve of the action itself and all that’s up for debate is whether Twitter is a good way to announce it.
The problem I have isn’t that Twitter sets the wrong tone, or anything like that; I just worry that Twitter is not designed to be a secure authenticated channel, and so if it starts being used for important announcements then there is tremendous potential for mischief.
Yes of course it is ok to report anything on Twitter. Who are we to say what “should” or “should not” be announced? What about free speech? I’d apply the same criteria as we apply to free speech in the rest of society. Namely, anything goes as long as it does not incite others to violence. Just because people find a tweet tasteless, does not mean it should not be posted.
If an organisation puts out a statement, then it can just as easily be picked by the layman and tweeted as it can be tweeted by the statement author.
Does the type of statement then make it unacceptable for the author to tweet their own statement, but acceptable for an interested bystander to tweet about it?
I think I would prefer the original Tweet to come from the official channels – if only to try and minimise the sort of “omg, lol dead innit, like!” initial tweet, which could be the one that gets retweeted all over the place.
At least he displayed his own callous disregard for human life, rather than relying on some paid lackey to compose a press release. Just a shame that far too many Americans agree with him.
It’s clearly a troubling banalization; the difficulty being that progress happens no matter what; in the 1970s-80s it was the banalization of the evening news, today it’s twitter, plus ça change
A useful and timely reminder that the United States is a very different country to the United Kingdom.
Whether something is reported in any format is less an issue than whether the manner and form of reporting is appropriate, proportionate and effective (you might also ask: to what effect?).
Oh, isn’t that what IanVisits said, in a manner of speaking?
You know what? I think publicising his decision via Twitter was a good thing. There is a huge disconnect between what goes on in public office and the public understanding of and connection with it, the public’s lack of acceptance of responsibility for it, even. Perhaps when such announcements are intermingled with a community’s usual twitter stream, it might reach the audience better, spark debate and prompt some public ownership of the decisions. If Americans still want to kill each other after that, I think it helps remove one of their excuses for why it still happens. (Must … resist … debate … on death penalty and anti-Americanism … arrgggh!)