www.byjp.me/content/posts/tumblr-musings/twitter-as-a-weapon/index.md
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I can't spot any errors with the regex I used here, but there may be one or two articles that change shape — hopefully I can spot them and fix them!
2024-06-20 13:40:54 +01:00

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---
title: Thoughts on Twitter as a Weapon
summary: A short thought-piece on reports of a person paying to promote their complaint tweet.
date: 2013-09-04T08:34:00+00:00
draft: false
emoji: 🥊
tags:
- news
- twitter
- customer-service
- from-tumblr
---
My brother just showed me to "[an interesting news story](https://bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23943480)" - it really is.
Mr. Syed won't be the first person to use advertising space to get eyeballs on a private grievance (though you can argue this one has public appeal too), but before the dawn of promoted messages on social media this method of being heard cost _serious_ money; I think the decreasing cost and general availability of releasing weighty negative advertisements is a serious potential problem.
![An illustration of an angry blue bird punching with UFC gloves](ufc-twitter.png)
The parallel Ms Wakefield draws with David & Goliath in her article is apt - Goliath isn't tech-savvy enough to use a targeted weapon like David and the damage is done before Goliath gets a chance to respond. My concern arises when I imagine a world where self-righteous Davids attack Goliaths in preference to more amiable methods of solving the problem; Goliaths will find this very difficult to defend against, as every person - David or otherwise - who they raise a shield at is a potential customer seeing a less compelling service.
Mr. Syed tells the BBC that he turned to promoted tweets after being frustrated at the lack of a suitable response from the usual complaint channels, this I applaud. It's clever, targeted and doesn't appear (too?) vindictive (we've all been down the poor customer service route with a Goliath before) so here's to hoping we, as Davids with a newly publicised anti-Goliath weapon, can keep ourselves from becoming too aggressive.