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Retweeting for AIDS research
By Rosie Perera | December 1, 2009 at 10:43 pm
So, yet again my mixed feelings about Twitter get tweaked. An old friend of mine from Microsoft has hit the headlines in Seattle’s TechFlash, and raised over $7,500 for AIDS research merely by sending out one tweet. It said “For each re-tweet, I’ll donate $5 to fight AIDS.” It started as just a twexperiment (Twitter-speak for “Twitter experiment”). The tweet went viral, and within a few hours Mike had to adjust his original budget of $500 and cap the offer at $10,000.
I’m wondering, though: did Twitter actually accomplish anything towards raising funds for AIDS research? Couldn’t Mike have simply donated $10,000 without involving 2000 people retweeting his tweet? Isn’t he just encouraging people to think they can accomplish good for the world by sitting there twittering? Is rewarding this kind of “armchair activism” good for the world in the long run? Well, maybe the fact that his twexperiment became newsworthy is the answer. It bumped up people’s awareness of World AIDS Day, and perhaps for that reason we should thank Twitter. (Still, does your awareness that today is World AIDS Day make you do anything about it? It didn’t make me do anything about it other than “retweeting” this story about Mike’s twexperiment. Do you really believe that if we all chatter more about AIDS it will make it go away?)
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