Social media’s role having a huge impact on Red Cross work
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The International Red Cross working closely with the The Syrian Arab Red Crescent team, continue to provide first aid and medical care as well as food, blankets and hygiene items near the city of Homs, to residents and people who fled Baba Amr, while the worst hit areas remain off-limits. A senior Red Cross figure Tuesday evening confirmed to GenevaLunch that social media are playing an increasingly significant role in conflict areas, requiring more staff to deal with the stream of communication, which recently, for example, included French journalist Edith Bouvier using Twitter to contact the ICRC to ask for help.
Bouvier suffered leg injuries in the blast that killed two other reporters 22 February. She was able to escape Syria 2 March and go to Lebanon.
Geneva, around the jet d'eau: a popular place to tweet in Japanese
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The heaviest area in Geneva for tweets is the area around international organizations and the UN Palais building, and the busiest time of day is actually the middle of the night, according to data compiled by students in the Casa Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London.
The students’ blog, Urban Tick, shows that Geneva is unlike any other city where Twitter is concerned. The highest number of users are tweeting in English, quickly followed by Japanese, with the hometown language of French a weak third. But the really unusual feature is the time:
Twitter has become a force to reckon with among the followers of Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui, who was fired after saying on her radio show that President Felipe Calderón is an alcoholic.
Following her dismissal from MVS Radio for violating their code of conduct by “giving credibility to a rumour,” the tag: #Aristegui in Twitter became one of the three most talked-about topics in the micro-blogosphere aggregator.
Operación Tequila (@Contralacensura) was then born, in which Aristegui’s followers call for a boycott of MVS and Mexican presidency web sites.
The Mexican government has denied the rumours and MVS says it was not pressured by the government to fire the journalist, but many see Aristegui’s firing as indication that in Mexico, the government still holds sway over the media.
The president’s supporters say “mediocre Labor Party lawmakers, one or two columnists and malicious tweeters” are to blame for the rumours.
Aristegui continues to anchor the Mexican edition of CNN en Español.
Julian Assange could soon be free from Wandsworth Prison on £240,000 bail, once the cash is collected, in a London Westminster Magistrates Court bail hearing marked by more than just the news about the his freedom. The judge agreed to let journalists covering the case tweet the news directly from the courtroom. Assange’s temporary near-freedom was almost secondary news in the face of astonished reporters’ coverage of their own “freedom”. Metro, a UK online paper, notes that “Direct, live reporting from within court is not normally allowed in British courtrooms. Making sound recordings, taking pictures or even making sketches are all explicitly against the law (court sketch artists have to work from memory), and those present are often ordered to turn any mobile devices off before proceedings start.”
Links to other sites: Atlantic on how many tweets Assange gets you, BBC
Two of the key outlets for WikiLeaks fans to make contact and also make public their activities reportedly have been closed, with world media saying that Facebook and Twitter shut down pages that have been used to spread the WikiLeaks word. The Facebook page for Operation Payback was up and running at 22:25, however, as was the WikiLeaks page, although Facebook is reported to have said that the sites did not respect terms of agreement. Twitter has reportedly not given an explanation. YouTube continues to carry Anonymous support videos.
WikiLeaks claimed Thursday morning 9 December that it was mirrored on more than 1,300 sites worldwide, but the sites do not provide details for a community of potential hackers and activitists, which Facebook and Twitter have been doing.
Links to other sites: Mashable, Read, Write, Web, Ria Novosti,
Facebook users experienced about two-and-a-half hours of outage Thursday 23 September, and the social networking site apologized for what it called “the worst outage in four years”. Hundreds of thousands of users used Twitter, a micro-text messaging site, as an alternative.
Tongue-in-cheek tweets included news that productivity would rise, and that the US would climb out of recession; one tweet went: @Z100MoBounce Does that mean we have to actually…. Speak to real people?
Facebook explained that a change in its code caused a database cluster to be overwhelmed. In order to fix it, the decision was taken to close down the site temporarily.
Links to other sites: WebHost Industry Review, Wired, ZDNet
Update 22:42 Mumbai, India (GenevaLunch) - The Chennai Super Kings, winners of the Indian Premier League (IPL) had barely collected the trophy before the IPL was hit by scandal: the world of cricket woke up Monday to news that the head of the IPL (Indian Premier League), Lalit Modi, has been suspended by the Indian Board of Control on Cricket (BCCI), on charges of money laundering. The IPL is reputed to be the world’s wealthiest cricket tournament. It was created in 2008 and made a splash by giving the world a shorter cricket match, but it also quickly rose to become the darling of investors in India – then almost as quickly nose-dived just weeks ago when the financial crisis took a toll.
Modi’s use of Twitter to accuse a government official, suspicions about investors, calls of nepotism and more are part of a rapidly growing scandal that looks likely to pull in politicians, film and sports stars and business leaders in India.
Baroda Cricket Association President Chirayu Amin has been named interim president.
Links to other sites: CNN, Cricket Next, Times of India, The Telegraph, Calcutta
A concerted effort by twitter users 13 October has forced a London law firm to alter the terms of a high court injunction which prohibited the Guardian newspaper from reporting a story on toxic waste dumped off the coast of Ivory Coast. Less than an hour after “twitterati” and bloggers broke the news themselves, the law firm that demanded the injunction, Carter-Ruck, telephoned Guardian lawyers to say that they had asked for the injunction to be altered.
The Guardian received the injunction from Carter-Ruck on 11 September in response to a story about an oil and gas exploration firm, Trafigura, which allegedly had dumped toxic waste in the sea off the Ivory Coast and is being sued by 31,000 Ivoreans. The terms of the injunction prohibited the newspaper from reporting on a parliamentary debate about a report into the alleged incident. The Guardian, Wall Street Journal
Social network giant Facebook says it will buy FriendFeed, an aggregator startup, for an undisclosed sum, the company announced 10 August. FriendFeed was started in late 2007 and allows users to compile and consolidate information across a broad range of media. Users can assemble updates from blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter alerts and Facebook updates in one place. Facebook says FriendFeed’s four founders, all alumni of Google, will continue to occupy key positions at the merged company. Industry observers note that this appears to be Facebook’s answer to Twitter’s rebuff when the social network tried to buy Twitter for a reported $500 million, according to Reuters. Facebook, Reuters
Police in Melbourne, Australia, plan to use Twitter to publish “‘embarrassingly boozy breath readings’ recorded during traffic operations” in order to reach young people out partying, in an effort to convince them to cut back. A Victoria police official points to the example of one car stopped on three occasions with drivers who’d been drinking and said the police need to use new tools to get across the message about the dangers of drinking and driving. Straits Times, Singapore/AFP
Cyber criminals are expanding their rapidly growing online business by embedding malicious software, or malware, in Twitter messages known as tweets, reports CNN, citing a security firm in Spain which argues that the malware is put in links of tweets on popular subjects like sports, popular tv programmes or breaking news. Sean-Paul Correll of Panda Security, an anti-virus company monitoring Twitter traffic, says the malware is linked to organized cyber criminals. Cyber crime is estimated to cost consumers and companies $100 billion world-wide and is increasingly sophisticated.
Continual rapid news updates and social networking tools like Twitter can cause further indifference to human suffering, some studies show, reports CNN. The media give too little time for the brain to digest violence and suffering in one story before they bombard the viewer with the next and this can have implications on their morality, according to a University of Southern California study. Twitter sees itself as a solution to information overload because the viewer can step in and out of the information flow at will, according to CNN.
Ravine where snowboarder, reportedly Rob Williams, died (photo: Valais police)
Updated 4 March 07:00 Verbier, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The UK’s Liverpool Daily Post and BBC report that Rob Williams, a British entrepreneur who co-founded retailer Dolphin Music, is the snowboarder who was found dead at the bottom of a ravine late Monday night. Its report covers the heavy use of Twitter by fellow entrepeneurs who were part of a group in Verbier once the mountain rescue operation was underway. The British Foreign Office and Valais Police have confirmed only that the 29-year-old whose body was found was British.
