How Twitter Effects Change

Following up from our earlier post today on Kyle Sandilands Trending on Twitter …

Kyle Sandilands has put his foot in it again and the backlash has been swift. His comments about news.com.au journalist Ali Stephenson, who wrote an article reporting criticism of his TV show have made a big impact on the Australian public, and it hasn’t been a positive one.

#Vilekyle is still trending in Australia, the twitter feed for the hashtag showing that the anger felt towards Kyle is alive and well, every second a new tweet appears and many are instantly retweeted.

The petition that was started by Change.org calling for sponsors of the Kyle and Jackie O to remove their support from the show has reached over 8000 signatures after a quick spread on twitter.

What effect has this viral campaign had? Well Kyle’s sponsors seem to be dropping like flys. As of 12.30 today, Blackmores, Fantastic Furniture,  Holden, Vodafone & The Good Guys have all pulled their ads from the radio show. Pretty impressive stuff, and something that probably couldn’t have been achieved so quickly and efficiently without twitter.

Twitter allows us to spread information at lightening speed. A retweet takes only a second and within that second you are spreading that message to dozens of new people, many of whom will retweet the message again.

GetUp (the independent, community advocacy organisation) use twitter for their campaigns on a regular basis. One of the most successful of which has been the promoting and spreading of their marriage equality petition which has gained thousands of signatures due to it’s viral spread on twitter.

The occupy movement both in Australia and overseas have been very effective inusing twitter to get their message out. The occupy Sydney hashtag is employed to arrange meeting times, spread the word on protests and send out images. Images of violence from Occupy Wall street quickly went viral and were featured in the media all across the world. This is citizen journalism at its finest.

Twitter helps us to achieve change by creating a united front, the hashtags and the twitter stream brings people together. Where once you might have just been one person writing a letter to the sponsors of Kyle’s show, now you are part of an angry crowd, demanding change, something which is much harder to ignore.