Without doubt a great story and a true show of the infinite power of social media.
For those of you that don’t know the Daily Mail, it is a distinctly ‘Middle England‘ newspaper that deals in sensational headlines aimed at any liberalism it can get its hands on. It is despised by nearly all intelligent humans but still manages a high readership, which stuns me.
Basically, last week they put up one of their typical nonsense polls asking the ridiculous question ‘Should the NHS allow gypsies to jump the queue?’. Obviously the answer is no, it is a proposterous poll, designed to offer all the intellectual nurishment of… well the Daily Mail.
Some bright spark(s) put out a tweet asking the twitter population to vote ‘yes’ to swing an absurd poll to an absurd result. I don’t know how many people voted but thanks to bit.ly, I have a good indication. Big Cat Director Anthony Tattum tweeted it from bit.ly and recieved over 40,000… yes 40,000 retweets. He was recieving 200 retweets every 10 seconds at one time.
Even the biggest twitterers on the web don’t get those kinds of results, I assume (sadly I don’t fall in that bracket). The phenomonal number kept rising till it peaked at around 46,000.
The incredible amount of traffic going to the Daily Mail website caused the site to crash and the poll removed. A success I’m sure you’ll agree. The butterfly effect is alive and well and living in the twitter world.
Are there any other examples of twitter making a difference, if so let me know.
1 Comment
June 23, 2009 at 11:33 am
Re: twitter making a difference, the US Government ordered twitter to postpone site maintenance in order to allow Iranian twitterers to continue covering the Tehran protests. Foreign journalists have been barred from reporting, but the Guardian council can’t stop the people speaking!