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Social media is king when it comes to news
KORNCHANOK RAKSASERI
@Aim_TH

BANGKOK: -- IT'S BEEN a busy week on social media in Thailand, with so many issues to follow, ranging from progress in the Erawan Shrine bomb investigation to comments on the draft charter, and from a new digital make-up application to "naughty" behaviour during a university hazing event.

Then there was the image of a toddler's body that had washed ashore in Turkey that showed up on people's Facebook timelines.

That photograph caught everybody's attention, ranging from Al Jazeera saying, "If these images don't change Europe, what will?" to Facebook users like Nopparat Chaichalearmmongkol complaining: "How can the media show such an explicitly horrible image?"

Though this image wasn't widely shared, it did give rise to discussion about the refugee crisis in Europe, and expressions of shock and sorrow.

Thiamjai Thongmuang shared an image posted on the Europe Says OXI page, showing the boy's body in a bed. She wrote: "I have been looking at this [boy's] picture all day. I feel so sad about what happened, and looking at it makes me intolerably sad."

Clearly, we cannot underestimate the power of social media.

Khaosod newspaper's website is a case in point.

According to truehits.net, Khaosod's website - www.khaosod.co.th - recently enjoyed more than a million views from unique IP addresses daily.

However, this number dropped dramatically on Saturday when the website was banned on Facebook - people could no longer share links.

Every time they tried, they received the message "The content you are trying to share includes a link that our security systems detected to be unsafe: khaosod.co.th".

Then Khaosod began sharing links on Facebook via it sister paper Matichon's website - www.khaosodenglish.

Then, keeping tight-lipped about the ban, it |later began sharing links |to its new website, www.khaosodonline.com, and by Thursday it had had as many as 928,000 views from unique IP addresses, with 92 per cent of them coming from Facebook.

Similarly, Thai Rath's website, thairathco.th, got over 765,000 visits with 71.5 per cent IP addresses traced to Facebook.

Matichon Daily's matichon.co.th had over 462,000 visits, with 75.6 per cent from Facebook; Tnews's tnews.co.th, got over 426,000 hits, 71 per cent from Facebook; and 33 per cent of the 244,000 hits in Daily News' dailynews.co.th website also came from Facebook; just like 70 per cent of the 79,000 hits in Voice TV's website.

While media academic Mana Treelayapewat decided to keep this case for study, Tana Toommnon wrote: "Really worth studying. From 'Content is king' it is now 'Social [media] is God'."

Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/politics/Social-media-is-king-when-it-comes--to-news-30268191.html

-- The Nation 2015-09-05

Social media is a perilous news and gossip source. Easily shut down by you know who. Totally unreliable.

and the Ko Tao double murder case that you seem to have ignored