The power of tweets | From the Guardian | The Guardian - The Diigo Meta page

• 12 Nov 09
  

  Lynette Webb

  twitter

• 01 Nov 09
  

  T. Rex Bean

  twitter trends technology henley

• 31 Oct 09
  

  Jimmy Breeze

  twitter politics liberalism future democracy power

  • Anyway, Pack's thought was this: since almost everyone who's written for this book is also on Twitter, many with quite a few more followers than me (Brooker, for example, has 86,000 people hanging on his every tweet), what if I asked them all to tweet about it, on the same day, just before it launches? So he did. And as a result, The Atheist's Guide "went from about 20,000th on Amazon's live bestseller list, to 14th. In a single day. We just sat there watching it move up the chart, hour after hour. And it hadn't even been published."

  • So Pack tweeted: "Vile piece of 'journalism' about Stephen Gately by some evil cow called Jan Moir". Ben Locker, a smart young copywriter with a very healthy 3,800-strong Twitter following, agreed: "Yes, that's a disgraceful article." Pack came back with "Can we get #janmoir trending?" (for the uninitiated, #before a word, known as a hashtag, is Twitter users' way of uniting their tweets around a particular topic; "trending" means it is on Twitter's list of the 10 most tweeted-about topics on the site).

    Then things started to move fast (but not, Pack would contend, in any way that could remotely be considered "orchestrated"). Pack's followers re-tweeted his and others' posts, as did their followers' followers. Within hours #janmoir was topping Twitter's trending topics. Fry weighed in; Brown did likewise; Brooker stepped in – and a Twitterstorm was born.

    It was every bit as effective as Pack's fully orchestrated bid to tweet his book up the Amazon rankings: by the end of the day, the Mail website had amended its headline, companies including Marks & Spencer had pulled their advertising from the offending webpage; and the Press Complaints Commission had received a record-breaking 1,000 complaints (it would later receive 22,000).

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  • • Now here's a third piece of Twitter power (which doesn't, amazingly, involve Pack). On 12 October, five days before Moir's Gately article was published, the Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, posted a tweet referring to a super-injunction obtained by lawyers for the oil-trader Trafigura, which prevented the paper not only from publishing anything about a leaked report detailing the potentially lethal nature of waste the firm dumped in Ivory Coast, but also from mentioning the injunction's existence. Now, Rusbridger was saying (of necessity, somewhat allusively), the lawyers had warned the Guardian not even to report that MP Paul Farrelly had tabled a Commons question about the injunction. "The Twittersphere," Rusbridger later wrote, "went into meltdown." And once again, it produced results: within hours, Farrelly's question had been tracked down and the relevant links tweeted. By midday the next day, helped along by (guess who?) Stephen Fry, "Trafigura" was a trending topic across Europe. By lunchtime it had withdrawn its injunction.
    • The implications, Levy writes, "were profound. No one thought people would want to follow strangers, or that celebrities would use Twitter to apprise fans of their activities, or that businesses would use Twitter to launch new products … Essentially, Twitter left a ball and a stick in a field and lurked around as its users invented baseball."
    • "Probably the most useful business tool I use," says freelance writer and new media blogger Robin Brown. "Anything people want to disseminate, anything they want to 'crowdsource', they're going straight to Twitter. But it's only gained that kind of traction in the past six months or so. Somehow, Twitter seems to have captured the imagination. I think maybe it's to do with those 140 characters. A lot of people who find blogging hard love it."
    • He goes so far as to wonder whether "the age of politics as we knew and loved it is now over". Do the two recent big Twitterstorms, he asks, mark a fundamental "shift in the very focus of democracy" – has "the Twinternet become the new Fifth Estate?"
    • But he has spotted a potential danger. "Twitter," Fry says, "may seem to some to be dominated by bien-pensant, liberal spirits at the moment. Will I be so optimistic about it when those spirits are matched by forces of religiosity and nationalism?
    • Locker believes people are "actually quite selective about the bandwagons they jump on", but he is aware that "Scott Pack started the whole Jan Moir thing off with the intention of it becoming a trending topic. He was explicit about it in those early tweets. I think he's to be commended for having the idea and putting it into action … but it's the first time I've seen someone hung out to dry with intent from the outset."
    • But others are not quite so positive. The sheer weight of Twitter's collective voice, some believe, might even prove a danger to free speech. Of the Moir storm, writer Tim Brown has decried in Spiked Online "a spectacle of feelings, a seething mass of self-affirming emotional incontinence, a carnival of first-person pronouns and expressions of hurt and proxy offence". The danger of these "vast explosions of offence-taking" is that they create "a 'you-can't-say-that' culture in which one is scared to speak one's mind".

    • Even Scott Pack concludes Twitterstorms are "alright if they're basically about pointing out that someone has written something really, really out of order, and wanting to tell people about it". But some Twitterers, he says, published Jan Moir's home address. Others were plainly every bit as out of order as the journalist's piece: "It wouldn't be so good, obviously, if it reached a point where people were stopped from expressing an opinion."

      The bottom line with Twitter, though, Pack argues, is quite simply that "I've got a way of saying something now. And if enough people agree with me, we can really make a difference." That, obviously, gives the site a mighty momentum – and be warned: a leaked internal document from Twitter suggests the site is aiming for 1 billion users by 2013. With that many Twitterers tweeting, the document reportedly says, "we will be the pulse of the planet".

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  Pablo Nieto

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