In the wake of the Paris Brown Twitter scandal comes news of another young lady tweeting first and thinking later. Emma Way is the latest to fall foul of underestimating the longevity and influence of twitter; tweeting “Definitely knocked a cyclist off his bike earlier. I have right of way – he doesn’t even pay road tax!” The message was intended as a ‘light-hearted’ take on an incident earlier in the day. Little did she know that the resulting backlash would include threats, three potential police charges and a disciplinary at work for damaging the brand. BBC Interview here:
Moving on from the somewhat callous nature of this tweet, and even ignoring the nasty threats, what I still struggle to understand is the way many people use social media platforms and the lack of thought which goes into their content!
Used at their best, social media platforms provide an opportunity to share snippets of news, ideas, personal thoughts and even private information (if you want to), but unlike the pink padlocked diaries of our youth, these publishing tools put live information into public streams and enable others to read, share, photograph and permanently capture your thoughts, feelings, emotions and information. Put bluntly, bad news is great news and other users will jump quickly on car-crash tweets (excuse the pun) far faster than any others and you can be sure that once you let it loose, there’s no taking it back! Emma goes on to admit the tweet was ‘stupid’ and had she known the backlash ‘she wouldn’t have tweeted it’, but this is a case of too little too late in a world where instant publication can become instant humiliation!