Years ago people read newspapers and watched the daily news
to keep up to date with whatever was going on in the world. Be it economic,
gossip, or criminal news etc. Nowadays we have many outlets to find out any
news we want whenever we want. It is constantly available 24/7, 365 days of the
year. We have social media to thank for this, we have the likes
of Facebook, twitter, YouTube etc
The initial craze was Bebo when it
was launched onto the web in 2005 this was shortly taken over by Facebook and
in the last few months Twitter seems to be a strong contender in replacing
Facebook. The question I ask is 'can we trust these outlets to be factual and
informative?'
Let’s look at the presidential
election that was held here in Ireland in 2011. It was the talk of the nation
and spread across every newspaper, radio station, Facebook and was the topic of
1000's of tweets. There was seven candidates; Michael D Higgins, Sean
Gallagher, Martin McGuiness, Gay Mitchell, David Norris, Mary Davis. There was
plenty of controversy throughout the campaign but the main
controversy was the scandal that surrounded the front runner for the election;
Sean Gallagher.
Sean Gallagher took part during in
a debate between the seven candidates on RTE's programme The Frontline
on October 24th 2011. A tweet was posted on the twitter feed '#aras11', it
read: "The man that Gallagher took the cheque from will be at a press
conference tomorrow". The twitter account responsible was
"@mcguinness4Pres". This tweet was in response to Martin McGuiness'
(Sinn Fein candidate) allegation during the debate that Sean Gallagher took a
cheque of €5,000 for Fianna Fáil from a business man 'Mr Morgan' and convicted
fuel smuggler. In the end this tweet turned out to be false but it damaged Sean
Gallagher's campaign for the election so much that he lost lots of votes and
ended up losing his bid to become Ireland's President.
This is a travesty to think that
one simple post made by an anonymous source on a social media site may have
changed the outcome of the election.
