When ‘micro-blogging’ took off and journalists and media outlets got on board in a big way. But a founding member of company that launched Twitter ten years ago tells Mediawatch the original plan was nothing to do with the short, sharp messages it is now famous for.
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Last week, social media platform Twitter was in the news - not in a good way.
Mediaworks presenter Duncan Garner quit Twitter after receiving abuse from people who reckoned his newspaper column about immigration was racist.Two days later former broadcaster Sean Plunket quit twitter after he provoking an angry online reaction by sending out a tweet about disgraced Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein.
He said it was "an experiment" designed to show that people on Twitter go straight to condemnation in response to a comment they don’t like, rather than seek clarification.
Writing on RNZ’s site the Wireless, Susan Strongman pointed out that was not surpriing the wake of worldwide fallout from the Weinstein revelations.
“In a week where a shamefully high number of women were feeling rarked up by overly familiar accounts of workplace abuse, was it not at all surprising that little twerps joking in the corner didn’t exactly have us all in fits of giggles?," she asked.
This week, Twitter featured heavily in a profile of new Green MP Golriz Gharhaman published by the global news website The Guardian.
“My Twitter feed is going into the national archive, it will be interesting for others to see what happens when for the first time a Middle-Eastern woman, a refugee, ran for parliament here - both the support and the attacks,” she told The Guardian.
Twitter also got a mention in the Wellington High Court this week where this country’s two biggest news companies are appealing the rejection of their proposal for merger.
"I don't often find myself quoting President Trump, but he said recently that having a Twitter feed was like owning the New York Times but without the losses," David (CHECK) Goddard QC, representing Fairfax Media and NZME, told the court.
He did indeed - and where else but on his favourite social media platform:
When ‘micro-blogging’ started to take off in the late 2000s, media companies and individual journalists alike took to Twitter in a big way.
But when Twitter got off the ground back in 2006, it was not at all obvious it would become a tool that journalists and mainstream media would take to worldwide.
Evan Henshaw-Plath was a founder member of the company which developed Twitter back in the early 2000’s.
On a recent visit to New Zealand, he told Mediawatch the short sharp messages that Twitter has become famous for weren;t actually a big part of the original plan.
Evan Henshaw Plath Photo: Supplied
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