Talk the Talk, Tweet the Tweet

In today’s changing society, humans use a lot of social media like Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. Those are the main networks that we use all the time and we hear about them too. There’s one that many didn’t hear about for awhile until now, and thats Twitter.

Twitter is a lot like the other social media networks. It allows people to communicate, keep up with news, or just use for their popularity status. Before now, Twitter was never really talked about in the news, until Trump became president. For those of you who don’t know, Trump uses Twitter a lot and he’s very honest in what he shares. Some people don’t like what he says and the media often makes a big deal out of it. With this “drama” being posted on Twitter, it has drawn in more people because they think that it’s entertaining to see what the President has to say, and it’s a way to keep up on news that’s real, from the actual person. It’s also not able to be manipulated like the news on TV. For example news on the TV has become increasingly less honest especially in the politics because they are changing the stories to make things worse than it actually is and only tell some of the truth but not all of it and leaving out the more important details to have the full honest story and not just what the news wants people to see, which is becoming more common too because there are news shows like CNN and FOX that show a clear bias towards a certain political group. Twitter helps show more of the truth because its coming from the source most of the time and not going through several different people before its put out.

This popularity has been created because it’s also a way that Trump has stepped down to our level and is being more involved with the public by using a social media network that’s typical for most people. When Trump tweets, the public is able to feel more connected to what’s going on. “37% of Twitter users are between ages of 18 and 29, 25% users are 30-49 years old,” says Salman Aslam of Omnicore. This is important because it shows that younger people are more likely to use it which means that they get a lot of the news from Twitter.Now that Twitter has entered the political world through Trump, most younger or tech savvy people will be drawn to that and will more likely follow up on news that way. Trump’s use of Twitter is great because technology is an important factor in today’s society and social media is popular among younger people, which means it’s a great way for that generation to be more connected to politics and be able to understand what’s happening right from the source, whether or not they like what he says or not.

Over time, Twitter has changed how people have been getting their news. Twitter allows users to comment, share, and post when news is traveling fast. One simple photo or video can go viral quickly and turn into something bigger than expected. “Nearly 9 in 10 Twitter users in the study (86%) say they use Twitter for news, and the vast majority of those (74%) do so daily,” says Tom Rosenstiel from the American Press. These statistics were taken in 2015, even though Twitter was not as common, people still used it alot without us really knowing. This year, “at least half of Twitter users have reported getting news on the site, but in 2017, with a president who frequently makes announcements on the platform, that share has increased to about three-quarters (74%), up 15 percentage points from last year,” says Elisa Shearer and Jeffrey Gottfried from Pew Research Center. Trump’s involvement has increased Twitter use, which has pulled in more people following up on their news whenever they’re bored, settling down for the evening or just scrolling through your news feed.

One example of when Twitter spread the news like wildfire was the Boston Marathon, “Twitter provided the view, an unedited, unscripted look into the world as it changed, through police-scanner blasts, eyewitness reports, and grainy citizen-journalist photography. It was raw, but it was streamlined,” says, Joshua Topolsky from the New Yorker. Twitter allows for people to share their first hand experience in an event like this, and its shows the truth of what actually happened, instead of all the different news stories.  Twitter makes news more connectable to the common people.

Let’s be honest, the people in this generation are constantly connected to their phones. Since the generation is technology based the newspaper is less common because our phones are more efficient and everyone has them.

Photo By: Twitter