A while ago I was told by a friend of mine that a life can be built and destroyed on Twitter. When I asked what she meant by this, she explained by saying that on Twitter you can be the worst person in the country or you can be made a superstar. According to her, “this month, you can be everyone’s Twitter goat, but next month you can be the coolest person out there.”
My next question was about Facebook. I wanted to know about the role that Facebook plays on today’s youth. Does it have the same power as Twitter?
Her opinion was that Facebook, for a lot of people, is yesterday’s news – it’s old and outdated. She believes that young people don’t go to Facebook to find out the latest scoops and trends anymore. “Twitter is everybody’s favourite. If you follow the right people you’ll find out stuff about all the latest fashion and about the scandals of all our celebrities.”
I must say, though, that even if other young folks may like Twitter, I’m just not that into it. I don’t know if it’s because I’m so used to Facebook and don’t understand how it works or maybe it’s because of all the people that have been embarrassed and harassed on it.
When I spoke to another friend of mine he suggested that I shouldn’t blame Twitter for what people do on it. He reminded me that various movements have also used it to promote their positive messages and gain support from the world.
He reminded me that in 2014 Twitter was abuzz with the #BringBackOurGirls campaign where people expressed deep disappointment and failures of the Nigerian government to tackle the Islamist group Boko Haram. He also spoke about the various social awareness campaign people come up with on twitter. I accepted that he was right about the positive messages that have been spread – people do generally support positive things on Twitter.
But my question to him was: do you think the people who supported the campaigns on Twitter would be able to do more to support them? If they were asked to do more, would they participate in marches and give donations, for example? I asked these questions because my ultimate concern is that some people choose to support things on Twitter, and even Facebook, just so they can get likes, comments, re-tweets and gain more followers – not to actually make a difference.
And those are my question to you as well.
Do you post and tweet about things on Facebook and Twitter because you want to spread a good message or because you want to gain more followers, re-tweets, likes and comments?
And if your tweets and posts are about spreading good messages, do you actually practice what you preach?
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