Social Media and the Japan Quake

My group looked at a lot of Twitter posts under the tag "#Japan" and found some interesting things.

Many people are using Twitter to get the word out about fundraising efforts.  Promoting the Red Cross fundraising efforts via text message is a very common occurrence.  Along the same lines, there are a lot of people offering prayers and thoughts for the victims.  On the opposite end of that spectrum, there are (of course) some rude and negative comments.  Some people apparently feel the need to make jokes or out-of-line comments.  The worst part about these is that they are put in the same bin under the Japan hash tag.

Twitter is also being used to get out information to various groups of people in Japan.  One interesting thing I found was the use of the US Army's Twitter account in the hours after the quake and tsunami and earthquake.  They used their Twitter account to reach soldiers stationed in Japan regarding evacuation procedures.

There are a lot of links to news reports on Twitter as well.  In that regard, looking through the tweets is a very useful tool to simply find out what is happening in Japan.  However, some people have posted some inaccurate information about the situation.  Our group discussed the thought that a person may misunderstand something they see on the news, and then take to Twitter with inaccurate statistics.  That can be troublesome for people using Twitter to consume news.