• It’s crazy how fast things move sometimes. Within a day, Nir Rosen went from some relatively low-profile journalist tweeting controversially about Lara Logan to Twitter trending topic who’s on Anderson Cooper. That’s right, he’s become the story as much as Logan has. (Which, considering the nature of the Logan story, is sad.) Nir Rosen has surpassed Kenneth Cole as the worst social media user of the Egypt crisis. But some have suggested that this is a situation where actually-harmless gallows humor met its worst enemy: The internet mob mentality. We disagree, but we’d like to offer our feelings first:

• Two mobs, two targets Foster Kamer, a journalist we like but don’t always agree with, had a pretty interesting take: “Lara Logan and Nir Rosen were attacked by the same thing. Or more precisely, the same sociological profile.” His correlation? A large online mob ganged up on Rosen, just as a large real-life mob did the same to Logan. While we can see where he’s going, Rosen largely encouraged the attacks by continuing to paint himself in a corner after the comments spiked out of control. He didn’t see the red flags.
• Tweet at your own peril The thing about Rosen that makes him effective as a journalist is that he’s brash and in-your-face. Problem is, he’s one of those guys with strong views who doesn’t see when he’s gone too far. It’s something he admits to himself: “I’ve often been warned by friends that someone as rash and careless as me should not be on twitter, and clearly they were right.” Rosen didn’t take Twitter seriously. The problem is Twitter takes Twitter seriously, and it’s at a public figure’s peril to ignore that. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • Permalink