Stories on Twitter: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Alejandro Fernandez | @al3jandr0TX

The Good:

Upon the death of Steve Jobs, national outcry for his passing was heard from everyone, from seemingly everywhere, as the influential owner of Apple had touched so many people with his time shared here with us. But one of the most surprising reflections on Steve was that of his nemesis tech giant, Bill Gates. Gates (@BillGates) had this to say about Jobs upon his passing: “For those of us lucky enough to get to work with Steve, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely.” Keep in mind that this coming from the same person who was criticized by Jobs as someone who “shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas...Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology” and in turn Gates criticized Jobs for not being an engineer. It is great to see that even though these two innovators had a complicated and sometimes tumultuous relationship, at the end of the day, a sense of admiration was shared between the two of them.

The Bad:

After the terrible destruction felt by the earthquake and tsunami this past March in Japan, very few people were foolish enough to make jokes about the situation. But one of these offenders was comedian and actor Gilbert Gottfried. Gottfried (@RealGilbert) had these tweets following the disaster: “Japan is really advanced. They don’t go to the beach. The beach comes to them.” He went on to tweet, “I just split up with my girlfriend, but like the Japanese say, ‘They’ll be another one floating by any minute now.'” His series of jokes not only secured himself hate mail for months, but also had him fired from his role as the longtime voice of Aflac. Aflac does 75% of its business in Japan and had this to say of Gottfried's remarks: “There is no place for anything but compassion and concern during these difficult times.”

The Ugly:

In May, a maid at the Sofitel New York Hotel alleged that then-chief of IMF had Dominique Strauss-Kahn sexually assaulted her in his suite. The allegation was a serious political sex scandal that made headlines everywhere. The scandal was one of the many political scandals that have surfaced over the past year. It may have been the frequency of scandals that gave Esquire Magazine (@esquiremag) the comfort level to joke tweeting: “How to get a better blowjob than #DSK - we think: http://ow.ly/5MMrH.” It is tweets like this that paint an even worse picture of an already damaging story for the people involved. These kind of tweets need to be better supervised because these vulgar words can lose followers and leave your company with a very bad reputation based on just a single tweet.