Sky News apologises after breaking Twitter silence
Image: Twitter screenshot
Sky News has apologised after it accidentally broke a two minute silence on Twitter that was backed by the Royal British Legion.
Websites and newspapers, including Sky News, had promoted the #2minutesilence campaign. It was hoped that users would not post tweets for two minutes from 11am on 11 November.
"2 minute silence on Twitter 11:00am GMT on 11 November #2minutesilence RT plz" was re-tweeted thousands of times in the run up to the silence and #2minutesilence became a top trending topic.
Sky News and BBC Business both sent out tweets during the silence. The tweets from @skynews, which had been sent out by automatic feeds, were deleted and an apology issued.
Some Twitter users say they are now boycotting the @skynews feed. Sky News have contacted some of the complainants individually to say they will take measures to ensure it does not happen again.
Times journalist Caitlin Moran also apologised after she accidentally tweeted during the silence. She tweeted: "Argh I tweeted during the two-minute silence! I just literally didn't know what time it was. I am very, very sorry. I am the new Jan Moir."
On trend, off topic
When you first join twitter it can seem like it is just Facebook but with only statuses. That is what I thought when I signed up, but then I discovered trending and search and realised how it could actually be a useful tool for journalists.
However as good as they can be, there are somethings for which searches do not work. Yesterday The Times' Joanna Geary tweeted, "Oh good grief! Any tips on how to search and filter for news stories about automotive brand Seat?#namesthatdon'tworkontheweb."
I think she was talking about searching on the web generally, but it raises the issue of how not everything is easy to find on twitter. Words like Seat are confusable and it's therefore hard to find the tweets which relate to the meaning you want, eg. the brand Seat, rather than just seats.
It is not just confusable words which are hard to find. When people tweet, with only a few exceptions, people do not generally use the 140 characters to include every keyword and tag their tweet relates to. For example, if I'm tweeting about something that happens outside my flat, I usually say 'outside my flat' rather than including the GPS co-ordinates, postcode, ward, borough, county, region, country and continent of my house. So if you were searching for things happening in my area, it's likely it might not come up in any searches.
To some extent I think it provides some relief that twitter does have imperfections which stop it being completely Orwellian. Nevertheless which websites do you find helpful in searching tweets for stories? I'm trying out TwitterLocal, which allows you to find tweets coming from a specific area, I will let you know how I get on.
