Makaila Jordan
Following
Twitter News for 24 Hours
In this assignment we
had to search through Twitter to find a news story to watch for 24 hours. I
chose a story using the hashtag #refugeecrisis. This “refugee crisis” refers to
the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis started in March 2011 with anti-government
demonstrations, these quickly escalated into violent crackdowns from their government.
The “rebels” began to fight back, with time passing a full blown civil war had erupted. Many people have been killed and the
majority of Syrian refugees are living in Jordan and Lebanon.
The
first tweet I encountered was from @ChinaXinhuaNews which first showed a photo a
little boy that had washed up on shore, as well as a picture of our President
Obama. This tweet was the most moving of all and proclaimed how urgent it is
for the US to intervene and how little they’re doing to help. The second tweet
comes from the same source @ChinaXinhuaNews 5 hours later reporting that developing
countries such as Brazil,
Venezuela and Chile are stepping
up to help refugees while the west still does nothing. 8 hours later
@AlexSalmond tweeted on how the UK had the capacity to help these people. Which
raises the question of why is nothing being done. Around the same time @ColdWar
Tweeted a picture depicting Arabs telling the Syrians to leave their country.
This symbolizes the real situation amongst the two countries. 20 hours later
@GeorgeChen twitted that Demark wants refugees to stay out! @PhelimKine tweeted
that China believes the crisis in Europe is due to western democracy almost 23
hours later.
After
following the story it has become clear to me that developing news like this is
basically the blame game. With each hour the new story was on who was doing
what and who wasn’t. Instead of telling stories of the hardship these people
are enduring they tell stories of the countries who refuse to help them and of
the hard work of others.
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