What is Twitter?

What Does Twitter Mean

Twitter , an English term that can be translated as "twitter" or "trill" , is the name of a microblogging network that allows you to write and read messages on the Internet that do not exceed 140 characters . These entries are known as tweets .

Microblogging is a variant of blogs (the digital logbooks or notebooks that were born as personal online diaries). Their difference lies in the brevity of their messages and their ease of publication (they can be sent from mobile phones, computers or devices with instant messaging software).
When a user publishes a message on their Twitter page, it is automatically sent to all users who have chosen the option to receive them. This message can also be seen immediately in the user's profile.

The Twitter platform was born in October 2006 in San Francisco ( United States ) as a social network with certain authentic characteristics. Among them, we can mention that it allows an absolutely free service and without advertisements (it is financed with the investments of venture capital companies), it is very easy to use and established a new form of communication , in which the public and the private are merge.
There are several concepts associated with the use of Twitter: followers or followers are those who follow an account, most popular topics or trending topics are the most mentioned topics of the day, retweeting is sharing a news that has been published in another account so that the followers of ours know it and hashtags are words or phrases that begin with the hash symbol or numeral (#) to create a list (when you click on a hashtag, Twitter performs a search and returns the messages of all users who have used that same hashtag).
Twitter and the Arab Spring
The tools are at our disposal so that we can use them wisely. There are no good and bad tools but positive and negative ways of using them. This is the case of Twitter and the revolution in the Arab world during 2009 and 2010. Thanks to the versatility of the networks and the good use that the Arabs made of them (taking advantage of their low boom and the little danger they posed for those who sadistically ruled these countries), it was possible that they played a fundamental role in fomenting the revolution.
Twitter was not only a space in which the revolutionaries could communicate with each other and go to the points where the protests would be concentrated, but they were also able to show the world what was taking place in their respective countries. And thanks to this, a revolution could develop that would mark the end of an era and would radically change the vision that the world had of these countries.
Despite the censorship that authoritarian governments imposed, social networks allowed the world to know well what was happening , unmasking the most tyrannical dictators of the last century. In this process, mobile phones played a fundamental role, allowing journalists and citizens to capture images and audio to show them in streaming to the entire world.

While the traditional media stood out for the resounding silence around the protest movements, the citizens did not, and this caused the voice of pages carried out by the revolutionaries themselves to be more notorious. Such was the case with Nawaat.org, which served to spread the news. In turn, Twitter was the platform that allowed the exchange of messages and collaborated with the protesters themselves to receive the encouragement sent from all over the planet.
The good use that the Arabs made of Twitter during the most preponderant revolution of the last century is, without a doubt, a sign that it is possible to adapt to the new times and make the new technologies an appropriate use , which allows us to grow and communicate to try together a more just world.