14
votes
It started as a fairly routine tweet from an inoffensive source - Canada's foreign affairs ministry. But in just a few days it escalated into a world-class diplomatic clash.
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- Title
- Much at stake as nice and nasty face off
- Published
- Aug 13 2018
Maybe it's just me, but I really dislike how much weight Twitter is carrying in modern society.
We thought of the platform and its users as a massive joke when it came out in 2006 and most people I know IRL still think of it in that light.
But, everyone from government officials, to actors, to CEOs are making massive waves based on comments made on the platform. When did we start looking at the joke of social media in a serious light?
Possibly when people started saying serious things on it - which was many many years ago. Even if you think the platform itself is a joke, that doesn't stop other people using it for serious purposes.
And this trend has only been reinforced since the leader of one of the most powerful countries on the planet uses this platform to announce official policy.
Yea, I really wish that was not a thing.
But I do see your point, granted when I see politicians using twitter it makes their views less legitimate to me. But I guess the flipside of that is them giving legitimacy to the platform.
It's not just politicians. People have been using Twitter for serious discussions for many years. About 7 or 8 years ago, I was referred to a Twitter hashtag that was being used for professional career discussions. Twitter was already being taken seriously by people before then.
Eh, a minority of people might have been sure. But the majority of the public didn't start taking it seriously and it wasn't a widely accepted platform until recent years. If I had to put a date on it, I would guess it was around 2015 when they hit the 300 million user mark.
So 299 million people were using Twitter just for fun? I find that hard to believe.
They rose 100 million users in about a year, so yea that would be the timeframe of their social acceptance.
I'm no expert in Twitter. I've never used it. However, I can read Wikipedia:
Even back in its very early days, it was being used for serious and official purposes as well as non-serious purposes.
You’re intentionally avoiding his point it seems.
Twitter was not used to announce companies going private, threaten and cajole countries leaders, call out sex offenders, ect. as a mainstream media till very recently. Did some of that go on? Maybe Idk. It certainly was not making headlines. It’s very recent that tweets consistently make front page news.
When they write "it wasn't a widely accepted platform until [...] they hit the 300 million user mark", it kind of undermines their point. Even if only 299 million people are using it, that still makes it widely accepted.
Also, you explained their supposed point a lot better than they did. Now I understand. Thank you.
To be fair, the Twitter comment is not really the issue between Canada and Saudi Arabia. It's more an excuse to start breaking off an already deteriorating relationship.
Edit: deteriorating not degrading...
True, still it still holds a lot more power in this situation than I would have thought the platform ever would (or should).
Definitely agree with you there.
We have already forgotten how important Facebook and Twitter were to the upheavals of the Arab Spring. Their importance can also be overstated, since many of the original grievances weren't about technology or youthful aspirations, but often about food distribution during droughts (Syria) and political representation in many other countries. But social media platforms were such crucial mechanisms to deliver democracy, however short lived, to the streets of the Middle East.
It was this effectiveness that drew the attention of Russia and China and a rogue's gallery of non-state actors to their potential. In the classic we-can't-have-nice-things dialectic, our social media has quickly and inevitably been turned against us.
As a historical parenthetical... I'd like to argue that the Arab Spring, like the Pan Arab movement of the 20th century, is not yet over. We've been too quick to dismiss it as a failed experiment ending in suffering and death for a generation across the Muslim world. But Pan-Arabism lasted fifty years. It is a slow process.
tl;dr--Twitter ain't all bad.