Self-regulation

Founded in 2004 as a social networking website exclusively for Harvard students, Facebook has roughly 2.07 billion active users, as of the third quarter of 2017 (Statista, 2017). Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004 and founded by Mark Zuckerberg with Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. On this network, users can produce profiles with pictures; create lists of personal interests; find contact information and other personal information. Users may also join common-interest user groups, and categorize their friends into lists such as "People from Work" or "Close Friends". Facebook users can also interact with other users or "Facebook friends" by updating their "status"; writing with other members "walls" or sending direct personal messages, photographs, sounds, and pictures. Users are able to "create and join interest groups, ‘like' pages, import and search for contacts, and upload pictures and videos.

According to facebook.com, using Facebook requires that users give their true identity and has a number of features for user's interactivity such as the Wall, Pokes, Photos, Status, which allows users to inform their friends of their whereabouts and actions; and recently, live broadcast. In July 2007, Facebook began allowing users to post attachments to the Wall, whereas the Wall was previously confined to textual content only. In essence, this made it possible for the mass media to post contents on Facebook. It allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos, compared with other image hosting services such as Photobucket and Flickr, which limits the number of photos that a user is permitted to upload. As of May 2009, the 60 photo limit has been increased to 200 photos per album;

and has even increased today. Broadcast media reporters can now snap more photos for news stories in addition to instant video streaming options.

Facebook Notes, a blogging feature introduced on August 22, 2006, that allows tags and Embeddable images is also invaluable to journalism. Users are able to import blogs from Xanga, LiveJournal, Blogger, and other blogging services (Abram, 2006). On April 7, 2008, Facebook released a Comet-based instant messaging application called "Chat" to several networks; this permits users to communicate with friends and is similar in functionality to desktop-based instant messengers. As from April 2011 Facebook users, however, began to make live voice calls via Facebook Chat, allowing users to chat with others from all over the globe. On July 6, 2011, Facebook launched its video calling services using Skype as its technology partner. It allows one to one calling using a Skype Rest API (Facebook, 2011) and has currently been replaced with Facebook Messenger app. On September 14, 2011, Facebook launched a subscribe button (Peters, 2011) which allow users to follow public updates, and people most often use this in broadcasting their ideas. This technological chronicle is a viral and veritable opportunity to the media practitioner who should be web 2.0 compliant to tap the potentials of using new media technologies.

2.1.4. 2. Twitter

Twitter, launched in 2006, is a “real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting” (twitter.com). Users initially communicate via tweets which are short posts limited to 140 characters, that allows for embedded media links. The character limit has improved today. Twitter is a Web 2.0 phenomenon that merges elements of blogging, text messaging and broadcasting. Users write short messages of about 280 characters or less, known as

‘tweets’, which are distributed to everyone who has subscribed to receive them. Twitter was founded in March 2006 in San Francisco, California and became public by August 2006 (Radwanick, 2009).

The number of users has grown dramatically for as of July 2009, Twitter reached over 50 million unique visitors worldwide (Rao, 2009).

Twitter became a major player in the social media industry in 2008. It was the first source to provide information on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India on November 2008 and to provide video of the US Airways flight that landed in the Hudson River on January 2009 (Wright & Drifka Hinson, 2009, p. 6). Twitter can be accessed from any device with internet access, including laptop and desktop computers, though the brevity of tweets makes the application, particularly suited to mobile devices, with users providing a running commentary on their daily routines. Tweets can include links to blogs, newspapers, magazine, radio station, TV stations, web pages, images, videos and all other material online. You can start tweeting in 10 minutes, anytime, from your computer, laptop, smartphone or tablet and if you follow other people and sources you build up an instant, personalized profile.

Arceneaux and Weiss (2010) on the usefulness of twitter observe that despite the scepticism that surrounds Twitter, evidenced by comical online videos and sneers from comedians, the application has attracted a significant number of users and the attention of major media outlets. Even many companies and government agencies have embraced the technology, using it for various marketing, publicity and customer service tasks. Twitter users can also “follow” or essentially subscribe to the updates of other users, some of which include conventional media sources, such as AIT, Reuters, NTA, CNN, BBC, VOA, AP, NBC or Al-Jazeera, celebrities, and friends. It can be categorized using “hashtags” which group posts together by topic or type.

However, its usefulness extends to the mass media as it is nowadays used as a participatory and collaborative medium to further interact with and gets feedback from media audience. By following other people and sources one is “able to build up an instant, personalized Twitter feed that meets your full range of interests, both academic and personal” (Mollett, Moran& Dunleavy, 2011, p. 1). In addition, the authors attest that thousands of academics and researchers at all levels of experience and

across all disciplines use Twitter daily. This means that a station who owns a twitter account could be able to groom more users to patronize their station if twitter potentials are properly harnessed.

Similarly, Twitter could be used for media research or by individual researchers. A Twitter operation can add extra value to almost any research project when you tweet about each new publication, website update or a new blog that the project completes. To gauge feedback, you could send a tweet that links to your research blog and asks your followers for their feedback and comments. Tweeting will be more effective when an open-web full version or summary of every publication, conference presentation or talk at an event is available online. Summaries of the published article are a closed-web journal on a blog, or on the university's online research repository. In addition, sites like www.scribd.com are useful for depositing open web versions. There could be tweeting about new developments of interest from the project's point of view, for instance, relevant government policy changes, think tank reports, or journal articles (Mollett, Moran & Dunleavy, 2011). With this, media audience research will be made easier.

Twitter has also attracted press attention for news coverage of catastrophes, such as the massive earthquake that rocked the Sichuan province of China in May 2008; the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008; the crash of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in January 2009 and the volatile protests after the Iranian election in June 2009 (BBC News, 2008; Beaumont, 2009;

Grossman, 2009; Shachtman, 2008; Spencer and Moore, 2008) as cited in Arceneaux and Schmitz Weiss (2010).

Twitter can be used by a broadcast station (radio) in two main ways and each requires its own Twitter account (twitter.com). The first account will contain a stream of ‘now playing’ song titles that will update as the songs change in the broadcast. The other account is a more custom news stream from the station that will allow a station manager to promote station artists, events, and contests. Few twitter followers will want to be updated with every song being played and will sometimes ‘unfollow you’ as the song stream data can be annoying and clog their stream. By having this second account set up – a follower can still get news and updates from their favourite stations without having to get a song- by- song updates as well. By splitting these up it ensures that news, retweets and recommendations do not get lost in the ever-updating stream of now playing song title tweets. One can set up multiple accounts on each and easily manage them on the same screen. One can also re-tweet one’s news so that tweets will go out on one’s schedule. “You can even set up searches for keywords relevant to your station and easily retweet and follow other users”(twitter.com). This invariably portrays the usefulness of Twitter in broadcasting, especially in the area of news management.

High profile moments for Twitter over the past few years also include the moment when James Karl Buck, a US graduate student, was arrested while protesting in Egypt in 2008. While in transit to the police station, he used his mobile device to send a tweet about his plight; his followers initiated a successful effort to win his release from jail (Simon, 2008). Many stories made national and international headlines with several users on Twitter providing first-hand accounts, maps, pictures and other relevant bits of information, utilizing the service as a form of citizen journalism (Beaumont, 2009). This actually indicates that Twitter is a veritable tool for journalistic work especially investigative reporting.

Bloggers also see Twitter as a new veritable form of communication with its own sensibility and distinct benefits. On this same line of reasoning, Mark Evans did not believe that micro-blogging would replace traditional blogging as "it complements..., by providing a forum for blog bursts as opposed to blog thoughts" (Evans, 2008). To this end, blogger Seth Godin opines that:

the medium has to be appropriate for the message. Using microblogging. . . to share your quarterly review or to fire someone or to make an important, nuanced announcement is just sort of dumb. Using it for keeping in contact with an ever-widening circle of friends and colleagues is brilliant (Seth’s Blog, 2008).

The brevity of tweets makes it valuable for the broadcast media. Several writers used the character limit as an opportunity for humour. Writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jim Auchmutey (Arceneaux & Schmitz Weiss, 2010) defined tweets as ‘short blog entries limited to 140 characters, which this entry just exceeded.’ In a story about the growing use of Twitter by businesses, a young woman who had just landed a PR job remarked that ‘the new resume is 140 characters’ (Baker and Green, 2008). Yet for some writers, the extreme brevity of posts was a drawback before 2018, as the format encourages the kind of cryptic, condensed language associated with text messaging in general.

Blogger Seth Godin, for example, states ‘if you’ve got 140 characters to make your point, the odds are you are going to be misunderstood (a lot)’ (Seth’s Blog, 2008). In this perspective, Twitter actually improves one’s brevity writing ability in journalism, which is good.

Another feature of Twitter is the near-instantaneous speed of information dissemination, especially on twitter. Recalling the amazement that was bestowed upon the telegraph, which was said to deliver news at the speed of lightning, Twitter proponents boasted of its superiority to traditional news outlets.

One blogger stated that news of a bomb blast in Manila was circulated via Twitter even before the local news got the story, while a writer at PC Magazine emphasized that the first news of the Chinese earthquake came via Twitter (A Feed is Born, 2008). Associated Press writer Dolnick (2008) made the same observation in relation to the terror attacks in Mumbai (and even made the same lightning analogy): The lightning-quick updates of the attacks that killed 174 people read like a sketchy but

urgent blow-by-blow accounts of the siege, providing further evidence of the profound change in how people gather their information in an increasingly new media age.

Similarly, in Nigeria it was observed that most broadcast stations, especially FM radios who has provided a web version of their broadcast and editions such as AIT, NTA International, Channels TV, ABS FM, Dream FM and even some newspapers, for instance, Thisday, Vanguard, Punch, Tribune, and Sun newspapers with online versions equally run active Twitter accounts. Oloja, et al (Adelabu, 2011, p.19-20) observed that "online journalism practice and online newspaper publication emerged in Nigeria in 1997, when the defunct Post Express started Post Express Wired…, as a response to the growing decline in readership among youths and fall in adverting." The foregoing has truly x-rayed that Twitter is significant to the work of media practitioners and broadcast journalists.