2.3 Safety on Twitter

Often people who are discovering Twitter for the first time are excited by the many like-minded people on it. It is possible to directly hear from people in your field, or to connect with students interested in niche areas of study. However, Twitter is also a place of divided opinions. There is a lot of misinformation and bad behaviour on Twitter. Some of this is from individuals with malicious intentions, other times it is from bots who are designed to create controversy on the platform.

Here Olivia Kelly talks about how the students she interviewed managed the negative aspects of Twitter.

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Transcript: Video 13 Managing the negativity of Twitter

Olivia Kelly

If you go into kind of the politics Twitter or you know you will get that very polarised you know the viewpoints and a lot of negative stuff. But certainly within academic Twitter that doesn’t appear to be the case and from what I’ve researched it’s very... It’s almost, one student described it as a little bit of like a bubble. You know, you don’t see the other side of Twitter.

One of the things that definitely came through from my interviews, and this did come up in the interviews, was that they all, all the students said, yes, that exists. We know that’s there. But you can actually use Twitter very strategically, very carefully, to avoid all of that.

So that, you know, the students talked about the different tools that are there. Like you can block people, you can actually block words. So if there’s stuff coming up in the news or in politics that you just don’t wanna hear about, you can actually put in like key words that you don’t want to appear on your timeline.

There are accounts you can block. If someone’s bothering you, you just block them. You can actually report as well if you see. thinking of students said about I’ve reported accounts that I can see are you know not really behaving appropriately and stuff.

So that again that was sort of another theme that came through was how the students definitely used it, used the tools that are provided by the platform to kind of make it an environment that they wanted to be in. You know make it a nice environment, make it friendly and avoid as much as possible the negative aspects of it.

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Video 13 Managing the negativity of Twitter

There is not space here for an extensive debate on this aspect of Twitter, some people even think that it will be the end of the app as people leave it because of the negativity. Olivia described how students manage this and it is very important when engaging in Twitter to closely monitor the impact that Twitter engagement has on your mood and motivation.

In the final session you will consider further how you can protect aspects of your digital identity. Not all forms of social media are public, some are designed to be more private, and one that is starting to gain attention in Higher Education is WhatsApp. You will learn more about this in the next section.