Is Twitter Responsible For News Of The World’s Shutdown?

If you are a news-savvy then you would know what am trying to indicate by this title. Yeah, am referring to the deplorable news that staggered the tranquil British. Oh am I bamboozling you? Well let me explain briefly about the news I mentioned in the previous sentence.

More than the news, it is the newspaper that I was mentioning. Yeah Britain’s popular tabloid News of the World has itself became news; to be precise it became a scandal. Reason – They trapped the voice mails of murder victims (yup! Not the convicts but victims), their relatives, so on and so forth. The scandal got a heavy hype when the newspaper listened to the voicemails of kith & kin of Iraq & Afghanistan death victims.

Now I can hear your internal voice saying “from where did twitter come into this scene”. That’s your question, isn’t it? Twitter, the famous social network is accused of killing this newspaper literally. These trapping of voice mails led to greater problems when it was brought to limelight. The problems include

• Protests by people for the chief of “News of the World” to resign;
• James – son of Murdoch said closing the newspaper is the ultimate way to solve the problem;
• Boycotts by people, etc.

Many sources now claim that twitter is the one who has shut it (News of the World). However, the point am and many others are emphasizing currently is that it’s not twitter, who’s behind shutting of the newspaper. The one and only thing twitter corps did was they just claimed the victory of accusing and reproving of “News of the World” as their own. Well, I don’t understand what is the big deal in thinking the victory of millions of people as own?

For those who argue that twitter is the main reason for shutting of this newspaper, I want to put forth a few facts.

• Newspaper is still the leading source of media (even after introduction of TV, internet, social networks, smartphones, etc). If a problem occurs in the newspaper media itself then it will reach the people faster than any other news.
• The people who boycott in Britain for justice against the News of the World tabloid are the ones from every field (not only the people who have social networks).
• The talks about this news are more in the local pubs (where people don’t even know that twitter exists) than in the hi-fi business areas (where people are always poking their smartphones).
• There was lots of news on twitter about other scandals too. Some have got justice and others didn’t. Does that imply twitter is responsible for all these? Definitely not.
• Finally, the biggest fact is that twitter never brought this scandal to limelight at the first place. It was print journalists who did it. Yes, a group of journalists guided by Nick Davies (investigating reporter of Guardian) were the ones who tirelessly worked to find the truth about News of the World and helped in bringing the scandal to the glare of publicity.

Now you would have understood that twitter as a social media did its routine work of aiding people to share (about this scandal) but it is and was no way related to bringing down the empire of News of the World.

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