And that’s OK when used for good, not evil.
As was the case for the massive social outcry about the Vancouver rioting following the Canucks loss to the Bruins Wednesday night. A Facebook group quickly formed to gather photo and video evidence against the rioters, and by Thursday night it had 80,887 likes.
Girl brags of riot activities on Facebook
Facebook comment from photo on Vancouver Riot Post Your Photos
These snitches gathered photos of rioters and encouraged people to tag anyone they recognized. As well, they gathered screenshots of Facebook users bragging in their statuses about their illegal exploits.
On Twitter, the Vancouver Police Department encouraged the public to submit tips, photos and video through the Crime Stoppers account.
And on Tumblr my favourite tactic – a public shaming project.
And it’s not just snitching on a local level that’s going on.
The Globe and Mail reported this week that social media users are helping NATO fight Gadhafi in Libya. “On Twitter, Facebook and other services, they discuss satellite images, vessel tracking data and the latest gossip from their sources inside the country.”
NATO officials have acknowledged that social media reports contribute to their targeting process – but only after checking them against other, more reliable, sources of information.
Regular folk are combing satellite images to find clues, such as military vehicles, to report coordinates to NATO.
As ever more content producers post their works, and with a growing, world-wide audience as witness, it will become more and more difficult to hide any bad behaviour. In this way, social media can be a society’s conscience.
Tanya Croft, Eli Purchase, Jean Escalante, Kyle Thomas and Megan Holsapple watch Taylor Moore's presentation on online interactive games at North of 60 Blog Camp, April 2, 2011.
Had a great time at my first North of 60 Blog Camp over the weekend. Thanks to Nancy Zimmerman for organizing the event, and to the other participants who shared their geek-knowledge. Here’s what Tweeters had to say about the event:
I just completed my first test of Storify, which is a fun and easy way to tell stories from social media:
Collect the best photos, video, tweets and more to publish them
as simple, beautiful stories that can be embedded anywhere.
The resulting story, shown below, can then be easily placed into a webpage, or linked to from Storify. Here’s what the one below looks like on its page.
The service is in Beta testing for the time being, and you must request an invite to use. Storify is being used by some large media companies to cover events such as the uprising in Egypt – both CBC and The Globe and Mail created Storify pages. And with the recent announcement that Storify raised $2 million in its first round of funding, it looks like we’ll be seeing even more Storify embeds on the pages of news sites.
It’s a great tool for breaking news, but could also be used “to remember an event through what people share, whether it’s a conference, wedding, election or natural disaster,” says its profile on Crunchbase.
How would you use Storify?
