Armando Siahaan
Piece of Mind: Two Jakarta Mall Suicides Demonstrate The Dangers of Twitter Journalism
It was on Monday, around 4:30 p.m. I was in the newsroom working on an article when my BlackBerry vibrated, indicating an incoming message, which was grim news.
A friend messaged me that an unidentified person had plunged from the fifth floor of Grand Indonesia mall, and landed on the railing of an escalator in front of Forever 21 clothing store. No further explanation was given.
I looked for details on online news portals, but found limited information. In what is now a natural reaction, I checked on Twitter but was even more perplexed by the bits of information being fed through the microblogging site.
It started with mismatching details over the person’s identity: A boy or a girl, a shopper or a waitress, the victim’s age and so on. The reason for the death was also a topic of dispute. Some wrote the victim fell accidentally while posing for photos, while others wrote it had been a suicide.
I soon learned from traditional news providers that the victim was a 24-year-old woman from Palembang, and she had committed suicide.
Even more disturbing, people posted real-time pictures of the victim on Twitter. The photos showed the deceased woman from different angles.
As if one alleged suicide wasn’t enough for one day, at around 9 p.m. I received a message from a friend that a 25-year-old man had jumped from the fifth floor of another mall, Senayan City, along with photos of the victim.
On Twitter, a conspiracy theory emerged: the suicides were intertwined, some sort of re-enactment of Romeo and Juliet eternalizing their love through death, or at least something along that line.
But even more alarming were some of the comments. There were sick jokes about how the victims took the “shop till you drop” motto too literally and that the malls should hold “Suicide Sales,” comments from people wanting to see a movie called “Hantu Grand Indonesia” (“Ghost of Grand Indonesia”) and one non-Jakarta user who wrote that Jakarta kids are so “gaul” (“sociable”) that they have to die inside a mall.
Yes, the suicides themselves were intriguing. But I was more concerned with how the technological culture of Twitter had adversely affected the public dissemination of news.
First, this case shows the downside of citizen journalism, where members of the public with no journalism background do the news reporting. Although I believe that everyone has the right to spread information, it should be done responsibly, meaning that it needs to be reported with the highest level of accuracy.
To post news on widely accessible sites like Twitter based on a user’s hasty observation of an incident, or solely on a picture or simply on what the user heard from a friend, without having any access to hard facts — let alone corroborating them with the authorities — is both misleading and wrong.
People should not speculate on the causes behind such tragic incidents, especially when they can’t support those speculations with substantive evidence.
The supposed Twitter analysts shouldn’t have just linked the two deaths as some sort of romantic Romeo-and-Juliet suicide pact. At the very least, they should first have proved that the two were ever a couple. They should have gathered evidence before proposing such an explanation, and not the other way around.
My third point has to do with the circulation of the death photos, which I found utterly despicable. I will never understand why people distribute pictures of dead bodies. Sensationalism, egotistical bragging rights and spreading fear among the public are some of the reasons I can think of. It is unethical and has absolutely zero value.
Those taking and spreading the pictures should have the decency to consider the families of the victims, would are most likely further traumatized by having photos of their loved ones passed around in public.
The last point I want to raise is the stupid and demeaning comments written by some Twitter users. I understand that the Internet is a realm where there are few limits on freedom of expression. But one doesn’t need to be a Nobel Prize winner, a religious leader or an overly educated person to understand that someone’s death is not something to make fun of, especially publicly. By doing so, writers are actually making fools of themselves.
But what’s even scarier is that, for some people, Web sites like Twitter are their main, if not only, source of information.
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Marmz
2:20 PM December 3, 2009Not to justify the circulation of photos, but have you watched Indonesian TV news? They do not shy away from showing photos of dead, dying, or dismembered people on nightly news broadcasts while people are eating their evening meals. Given the run of disasters that this country serves up, and the subsequent airings they get, would it be at all surprising if some members of the public are simply desensitised to seeing real-life violence on their screens and feel no moral pangs when faced with yet another unnecessary death?
As for Twitter being taken seriously as journalism, I think it is more of a social barometer than a worthwhile news source. It is valid in that everyone gets an opportunity to have an opinion, much like this forum, which is not always hyper-focused on the topic at hand! :-p