Twitter - the success (and failure) when it came to the Boston Bomber

As I'm sure everyone has heard by now, the Boston Bomber who was on the run for 4 days has been caught and what a lead up it was!

Now that Dzhokhar has been captured, many people have looked back at his social media during the time he was at large and before.

Friends of Dzhokhar confirmed that his account was @J_Tsar. Some of his tweets included "Ain't no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people" hours after he set off the bombs in the city. At this stage, no one was sure of yet who was the bomber. Two days after the event, he also tweeted "I'm a stress free kind of guy". I don't know about you but it's pretty scary and crazy how he can set off this bomb, kill 3 and injure 180 and then easily just sit there and continue to tweet. Although, then again, he decided to set off a bomb and then have a getaway plan that led him 10 minutes from the site - maybe more like a lack of a getaway plan?

 

 

Oddly enough, there were two or three people who made hoax account claiming to be the bomber - why, I have no idea. These imbeciles would then tweet to @BostonPolice and say "I will kill you as you killed my brother". I suppose this was just some people's way of getting a little excitement and entertainment in their life. Very stupid though!

Also, via Twitter during the day last Thursday, it became a big manhunt to find Dzhokhar and while avidly following each new update, I came across an application that you could download where you could hear the correspondence between police officers via their radios. This was mentioned on 2OceansVibe.com. Of course, the top radio that everyone was listening to was that of the Watertown police, Boston Police and EMS and Cambridge Fire and Rescue.

The problem that came about this though was everything the police were saying, everyone was tweeting. Police had to urge the public not to tweet what was being communicated via the radios. It was very exciting though as the police were honing in on Dzhokhar after they discovered he was hiding in a boat in someones backyard. As the police were planning on catching him, he's Twitter account were literally gaining thousands of followers each second. In the space of 10 minutes, he gained over 75,000 followers.

We sat up at 2am, police radio on the ipad, live streaming of them going in for capture and twitter on in the background - it was like an FBI headquarters in our room and I never felt so much adrenalin over something so far away from us.


The unfortunate thing though, Twitter isn't fully controlled and people nowadays are beginning to believe everything they read on Twitter - I mean if a lot of people are talking about it, surely it's true?

Instagram giving us the ability to become a paparazzi

So firstly, I don't have an Instagram account because, well, I don't have an iphone. I would love an iphone, but only for the reason that it takes such amazing photos on the phone and then with the simplicity of Instagram you can upload the image straight away. I do however, have many friends and people I know that make use of this application and had a look at some background knowledge about it.

The thing is, it allows all of us to become like the paparazzi. It can make celebrities out of the ordinary Joe. "If Instagram is helping birth a new breed of paparazzi, we might need a new breed of privacy law to counteract it", says Derrick Harris, writer for website Gigaom. It just seems that it's becoming easier and easier for one to snap and publish photos of everyone and in a world where they can spread faster and faster.

The ease of sharing photos and not thinking of the implications can lead to people losing their jobs, ruining relationships and possibly even facing a jail sentence. The legal questions would come into play with self-publishing, social media and viral content raise. It seems that you can no longer go out in anonymity but risk going out and becoming "an Instagram post away from being part of the digital record and possibly the subject of public ridicule".

Times are changing and it seems that if you miss a step, you will most probably fall behind.