Twitter has more than 100 million downloads solely from Android users. This famous social app functions in a way similar to blogging. However, each "tweet" is constrained to 140 characters so it is some what considered "micro blogging". Twitter works in a way that it allows you to follow other people so you could see their tweet and vice versa. An instant conversation can be done by replying the "tweets" of other people. Therefore twitter is basically a blend of instant messaging, blogging and texting.
The interesting thing about it is that you can find all types of people on twitter with different agendas. The users of twitter ranges from Presidents and Prime Ministers of different countries to celebrities to average people like you and I. Celebrities use it so that they can connect with their fans or to build a bigger fan base. Twitter is also widely used as a marketing platform. With twitter's hashtag function, whenever someone hashtags a brand in their tweet, for examples #nike, more people start talking about it! It also allows companies to interact with their customers and also provide them with customer service.
However, cyber bullying which is a serious social media issue is easy to be carried out on twitter. According to this article (The Huffington Post), researches find 15,000 bullied related tweets sent daily. It is sometimes hard to put to stop to it because many of this bullies hide behind a fake account. If these accounts were to be deleted due to inappropriate behavior, they would simply create a new account and continue where they left off. Cyber bullying on twitter is escalated when there are a group of this bullies and the retweet function on twitter allows them to share the tweets of the other bullies. The victims keep it to themselves and are reluctant to tell adults due to the fear of being bullied more or being labelled as a tattletale. There many cases where cyber bullying on social media's such as twitter has lead to suicide.
Cyber bullying on twitter is a serious issue and must be dealt with. Twitter users should report the account when they witness abuse on twitter. Abuse should never be ignored ever if we are not the ones being abused. Information on how to be safe on twitter is provided here .
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Author: Joohijit Kaur (B1203073)
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