' Call for silence on Twitter is more '

Tech November 23, 2015 16:30

amsterdam - With a photo of a large container of cat thanked the Belgian federal police Monday afternoon all those Sunday night audience gave the call to not tweet about the police actions in Brussels Sunday evening. Some people put pictures of their cat with the hashtag Brussels Lockdown. That example was soon followed and Monday even happened yet massively. "It was quite amusing. And wise also. It was after that call very little information out there, I do have the idea that it worked, '' said Peter Kerkhof, professor of social media at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Kerkhof can not remember before such call was made at such a big action. " At the evacuation of a building, the police reported that they sometimes suffer from 'live coverage' on Twitter, but that is not comparable to Sunday, '' he explains. " Twitter is the place to keep track of what is happening. You can quickly get information together. But it's also a rumor mill. Much information is unreliable. And incorrect information may lead to panic. '' The professor points to the explosion at Shell Moerdijk in June last year. Twitter appeared when many messages that were found to be wrong afterwards. " As a government you must currently have an online presence and visible. This works in recent years, getting better. It is important to distribute via that route information, but also right to negate incorrect information. '' Traditional media also still play an important role, Cemetery noted Sunday. The call for "social media silence namely also passed in the television broadcast, and the action then took even greater proportions in a short time. " You can large groups of people that way still reach quickly. But the role of social media in the next few years will of course be smaller, bigger. I think calls like to come more often from Sunday, and that they are being followed. Especially when it comes to cases in which people can help the police or other authorities. ''