First Hand Accounts Of Terrorist Attacks In India On Twitter | Hacker News Reader

First Hand Accounts Of Terrorist Attacks In India On Twitter

techcrunch.com

27 pointsqhoxie19 comments

I can't shake the feeling that sensational reporting of terrorism is complicity.

Indeed, without the media terrorism wouldn't be nearly as effective. Who would tell us to be afraid?

I'm going to start a new channel with the motto: "Fear anytime, all the time."

http://cache.boston.com/universal/site_graphics/blogs/bigpic...

Maybe not complicity, but fairly useless, yes. Reporting is also gatekeeping. Reading #mumbai on Twitter you learn nothing beyond what the ticker on CNN tells you ("Terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Situation confusing").

I was following #mumbai on twitter for a while and I have to say, It was more noise than signal. People retweeting the same thing again and again, some idiots guessing the names of the terrorist organizations which might be responsible and others talking about War on Terror with some random country which they assumed was part of it.

It was pure nuisance on twitter, there were no facts at all. It looked like a game where they were competing against each other to spread rumors. Twitter and Flickr will never replace my news because i overestimate the collective stupidity of the masses.

"... Twitter isn’t the place for solid facts yet - the situation is way too disorganized. But it’s where the news is breaking ..."

This is a useful insight with respect to your comments ( I was following #mumbai on twitter for a while and I have to say, It was more noise than signal ) So it shows the communications bit is there just the switched on person on the ground is not. Consider how real news organisations achieve this. My source of local news happened to have an ex-journalist in India to do a phone interview ~ http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/news/audio/news-audio/200811/200...

So Twitter is good for a short bit of info but is pretty useless to get across important information.

This article is so stupid it has literally drained my ability to point out how stupid it is.

That's a very broad usage of the word "article".

http://www.idesitv.com/ibnenglish.php

This is an inappropriate use of a current event to highlight the relevance of a tech trend. Pathetic.

The thing is, if you are following a thousand people on twitter, and you have this constant stream of tweets going by all the time, are you sitting there and watching them for significant news? Without a filter, the noise overwhelms the signal.

This attack may be from Hindu terrorists masking as Islamic terrorists.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Malegaon_blasts

"This attack may be from Hindu terrorists masking as Islamic terrorists."

So when the bodies of teh dead terrorists are identified and/or the captured terrorists are interrogated, then what?

The wikipedia article you link to talks about a completely different type of attack - people leaving remote controlled bombs in crowded places and detonating them later. In such a scenario it is possible to pretend to be someone else.

Yes there are Hindu terrorists, though nothing like the worldwide jihadi networks. They have no motive to target Americans/ Britons.

This is a really dumb speculation along the lines of claiming the perpetrators of 9/11 were actually Jewish fanatics/ the Mossad.

I think targeting Americans/Britons could be just to get wide spread attention than hate against any religion or nationality.

India currently is just a broken system - everybody having their bit of contribution to this whole mess including "aam aadmi" - common man who just sat quiet. Its just waste of time to get into blame game of pointing to political parties, religions, communities or anything.

India just has to get into a mass movement and fix itself. Or for the time being at least may be army should take over hoping it can't be worse.

may be army should take over

I know what's wrong with this line of thinking.

Look at the history; and see if there is anything that can be learnt from nations that went in that route.

Anybody irrespective of Jewish,Hindu,Christian,Muslim can BUY terrorists to plant bombs.

Due to the intrinsic cultural diversity, each State in India cannot efficiently govern (legislate,administer,justice) more than 2 million citizens per State.

Hence India should 'decentralize' 604 districts into States or Cantons as in Switzerland.

http://www.polldaddy.com/p/209736

It is true India is probably one of the very few countries with this vast a diversity in people, culture, language. There are more languages and far more religious communities in India than the number of states and districts.

However the small chunks of the country cannot self sustain. Its a complex problem where there is a strong necessity to be united at the same time ensure a govt which can handle the diversity.

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