Twitter strikes back on the Telegraphs news website after they decided to stream all comments that contained “#budget” directly to its Budget 2009 homepage, hoping for up to date responses of what people were thinking, however it didn’t quite go as well as planned as the Guardian reported.
The comments were not moderated and it wasn’t long before twitter users realised this and took full advantage to post comments on whatever they wanted, budget related or otherwise. The Guardian posted some of their favourite comments. One comment really sums it all up “Silly paper messing with technology it doesn’t understand #budget”.
It seems that newspapers need to be more careful using new technology and less naive about the public. With information being sent almost in real time these days, especially through Twitter, this type of error can spread like wild fire and could have polluted their page until the Telegraph had it removed. Twitter on this type of website, without safeguards, perhaps isn’t the best idea, perhaps it would have worked better if safeguards were initially installed.
Sky News has also caught on to the Twitter phenomenon with its very own Twitter correspondent. They look through twitter comments for breaking news stories. Oprah Winfrey also joined the world of Twitter after posting her first tweet live on her show.
