Twitter Creates Revolutions, Mass Panics, Influenza, Stardom - and Other Mass Media Myths

It's been a busy month for the Twitter broadcast text messaging service, with people around the world praising it, demonizing it and blaming it for just about everything from revolutions to planes falling from the sky to swine flu epidemics. Things got off to a blazing start in April when parliamentary elections in the Eastern European nation of Moldova set off protests, in which some people spontaneously started to use Twitter and other social media services as tools to communicate information and ideas. Using Twitter's informal tagging standards, streams of information about protests in the nation's capital and elsewhere were available to anyone who cared to search for them (#pman, #moldova and #chisinau were among the most popular Twitter tags, which are still used regularly for updates from political activists).

While a good estimate of how many people were monitoring and resending information sent with these tags is not easy to surface, reports indicate that there are fewer than two hundred people in all of Moldova with Twitter accounts. Looking at some of the Moldova-based Twitter accounts mentioned in reports, such as Moscovici and 1arsz, most seem to have a few hundred Twitter followers at most at this time, including many curious onlookers from other nations. Whatever relationship there may be to social media and the tens of thousands who turned out for protests in Moldova may be difficult to establish based on these numbers.

What does seem to have happened, though, is that major media outlets such as The New York Times were tying people who were using Twitter to communicate with protesters to the outbreak of violence and the planting of a Romanian flag on Moldova's parliament building. Follow-up reports and Twitter messages from protest organizers seem to discredit that notion, with some finding evidence that these negative turns to the protest may have been orchestrated by the Moldovan government to stir up anti-Romanian sentiment in Moldova.

It appears as if major traditional media outlets were too quick to pick up on the "Twitter caused a revolution" theme, from both a positive and a negative point of view, perhaps knowing that "social media stories" gain wide exposure these days. There may have been significant use of social media in these protests, but the mass media, ever on the lookout for heroes and demons that help to deliver a simplified version of the truth, glossed over the complexities and limitations of how social media was being used as a communications tool.

In other words, the "Twitter Revolution" in Moldova was a significant political event, but you probably could no more tie Twitter or any other social media service to many events there than you could any other widely used communications method. Leaders organized followers, who took to the streets for any number of reasons, some of which could have very well been crystallized by Twitter or Facebook communications, but many of which probably were related to more complex and deep-rooted motivations. Tools don't make revolutions; people do. On the other hand, the more than 400,000 people on Facebook who follow the protest of Buddhist monks in Myanmar (Burma) seem to have defined a sustained global political movement with true mass scale using social media tools - with hardly a drop of mass media attention.

Similar mass media-induced hysteria about Twitter flowed through a number of stories this month. When U.S. talk show host Oprah Winfrey was guided by Twitter CEO Evan Williams through her first "tweets' on her new Twitter account, the meme sweeping the mass media was "Oprah put Twitter on the map!" Some conjectured that as many as a million people joined Twitter because of Oprah. Yet data from Hitwise and Comscore seems to indicate that the Twittering on Oprah's show was building on an already meteoric rise in Twitter usage. No doubt there was some significant add-on effect from the event, but it was more of a confirmation of a trend than the creation of one. Similarly, the mainstream media also highlighted the "race" between movie star Ashton Kutcher and cable news channel CNN to be the first to have a million followers on Twitter. Hmm, what's more important, one movie star with a million followers or millions of everyday people with hundreds of followers?

The media focus on stars - including overnight stars such as Britain's TV talent show singer  Susan Boyle - overshadows the success of social media that has been built on everyday people building extraordinary influence as individuals and as communities. As the Content Nation book notes, there's room for both the powerful and everyday people to have influence in social media, but powerful figures and institutions using social media are playing in a game that really doesn't need them to succeed. It's this lack of dependence that seems to upset some mainstream media figures sometimes - and that tends to lead to the demonization of social media oftentimes.

Recently a low-level flyover by a government jet near the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor sent off a panic amongst many local residents and professionals who feared that it was possibly an airplane headed towards local skyscrapers. People using Twitter were the first to report the event. Somehow this was transformed by some reports in the mainstream media into Twitter setting off panics amongst local people. Yet an examination of Twitter messages from that day indicates that the "sensor society" using Twitter was largely very factual about events - and quite discerning about the ambiguity of the situation. Similarly the recent concerns about a swine flu pandemic were whipped to a frenzy in mainstream media outlets, yet in spite of claims about Twitter spreading the panic many messages on Twitter were effective in curtailing disinformation - and in presenting more balanced accounts.

The truth is that Twitter is just a tool, which, like other social media tools, offers a highly scalable technology that enables anyone in the world to influence any number of other people in the world on a moment's notice. People can use social media tools wisely or unwisely, to be sure, but in general people want to communicate to other people influentially in a positive way. We like filtering information for others - and trying to separate fact from fiction. Best of all most of us don't have to sell ads to have the right to do so, which may make citizen journalism less inherently biased towards sensationalism that can attract "eyeballs." We like following the lifestyles of the rich and famous, oftentimes, but social media reminds us that everyday people can be more interesting on most days -and, sometimes, can be people who are able to change the world.

No, the people using Twitter in Moldova didn't create a revolution any more than Thomas Paine created a revolution in America with his "Common Sense" pamphlet back in 1776. But, like Tom Paine,  by daring to use social media tools perhaps this handful of social media pioneers in that small nation began to spread facts and opinions that helped to change the minds of others on their own. And that, by any measure, will become a revolution on a global scale in time.