Photo Illustration by Shamaim Syed

Did you hear about the time when “Britney Spears died” or when “President Barack Obama was assassinated on Independence Day?” These were just some of the types of trends that rocketed to number one world wide as misleading tweets by some Twitter users. Even though Twitter has been accused for these fallacious tweets,Twitter is usually a great starting point for students to get updated on what is going on in the world.
Many times, Twitter has helped me become aware of what was going on at that moment. Take for instance the Boston Bombings situation; “#PrayForBoston” and “#BostonBombings” were a couple of the tweets that I had encountered while going through my Twitter feed on the afternoon of April 15, 2013. At first I didn’t even understand what it was and what was happening, all I knew was that there was a bomb which had exploded in Boston. I am probably not the only one that got this news through Twitter, since a lot of people don’t usually have news channels running constantly throughout the day.
Even though I have The Washington Post app, I don’t get notifications that inform me about breaking news, whereas Twitter on the other hand is something that I am constantly checking and usually alerts me when someone tweets something important.
Maybe the reason the increase of students reading more tweets for breaking news is because many big newspapers don’t cover local news, like take the incident in which a student had just committed suicide in Woodson HS on April 24,2013. A lot of the students from other schools including AHS found out about this through the tweets that Woodson students had sent. All these and more types of tweets are usually on Twitter, where it is mainly students who tweet about news update. Now students have become better journalists in covering more breaking news about schools and just local news more than Professional journalists who mainly focus on bigger and national news.
This trend in my opinion is a better way for students to be well aware of their surroundings. Not a lot of people really enjoy reading a long story to find out a couple of things, its rather more interesting to read a quick 140 character tweet and then if they want to get more information, they could go and read upon it more indepthly thorough the hyperlink that is usually embedded in the tweet.
But its not only students who have become better journalists, but everybody in general has also done a better job in keeping others well aware of their surroundings. During the Boston bombings, a man was tweeting from his house in Watertown, while the whole city was in lock down. The man was constantly updating about what was happening and how everything was going down.
The mans personal experience, not only informed us better than a professional journalist would, but it was much more reliable since we knew that he was right at the scene and directly informing us about everything that was happening.
A significant thing about Twitter becoming a great way to get news updates is that its easily seen worldwide. Wherever you are, in which ever country, in any part of the world, you would be updated with what is happening on the other side of the globe. As big news tweets quickly become worldwide trends, everyone in the world becomes aware of what just happened. This is also how a lot of people in third world countries, get notified. Since they probably don’t know about the different newspapers in the U.S., Twitter is able to inform anyone in any part of the world, because its popularity is so global.
But on the other hand, Twitter isn’t the only place to get your news update. Many times earlier this year and last year, there were occasions in which celebrity deaths started trending and for a quick second or two you would probably see tweets like, ‘Justin Bieber has died’ or ‘Rihanna had died of a plane crash and a heart attack.’ At first you don’t realize that its fake or real, but eventually you come to a conclusion that it was all a lie. So if you were new to Twitter at that moment, you wouldn’t be the only one to think that these deaths were real, but then you would realize that it was only some of the twitter users playing a joke and making it all up. So sometimes, Twitter isn’t the best place to get the most trustworthy information. Unlike in Washington Post or another big newspaper, you probably wouldn’t get these false alarms of celebrity deaths, or in anything erroneous in general.
Another thing to remember when you are going through your twitter feed is that it is seen to be very left winged especially since most of the twitter users are believed to be composed of students. So you will encounter a pretty good amount of biased in the tweets.
So it really isn’t too hard to say that Twitter might be a good social network site, that is doing a pretty good job in helping people all around the world be well aware of what is happening.
When Twitter was first created, it wasn’t aimed to be like a newspaper site, but with the rise of the Twitter users it surely has become one. If any major news whether it was national or local it starts trending worldwide and becomes a major hit.