The Olympic Games has kicked off and so have the Tweets. This world event has recorded some of the highest number of tweets to date. The opening ceremonies earned 9.66 million tweets alone. While some are using twitter to post pictures or root on their favorite athletes, others are using twitter for bashing athletes from their own country, and others, for bad performances.
Twitter can be a positive thing, as the United States’ “Fab-Five” Women’s Gymnastics team has shown. They are using twitter to tell how amazing the experience is, to thank fans, and to talk about how proud they are of each other for what they have accomplished. However, as we all know, twitter can be a very negative thing, and let’s face it, we usually only hear of the negative. A Swiss soccer player has been expelled from his team for tweeting a racist comment about a South Korean opponent. A Greek athlete has also been expelled for a racist tweet. Both were labeled “Social Media Offenses”. A young, teenaged, British diver who had a poor performance in the medal round received a message about how much he had let his father down, the teens father has recently passed away from a brain tumor. The person who tweeted the young Brit has since been arrested. Even the media is getting in to trouble over tweets. A member of the English Media has had his Twitter account suspended for releasing the private contact information of an NBC executive.
Twitter and other social media sites even affected actual events. The men’s cycling commentators were disrupted because so many people were using their smart phones that there was a break down with the bandwidth which caused a malfunction in the commentators GPS trackers and timers. This prompted Olympics Officials to ask the fans to “take it easy” with the use of social media at events.
Social media sites can be both positive and negative and even funny at times. Just be careful what you post, because people only remember the negative. I will leave you with this little clip of the most enthusiastic Olympics worker at the games, who has quickly become an Olympic Star herself, which would never have been found if it weren’t for social media outlets.
– Cole from HSM
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