Twitter may not have figured out how to make money, but people using the application have begun to figure out how to put it to work in a number of useful ways. It’s often been discussed how Twitter allows for a millisecond news cycle and aids in the sourcing of news tips from citizen journalists on the ground. But Twitter is also being used for controlled news and information gathering both by reporters and by projects aiming to affect social change.
Twitter可能还没有弄清楚如何赚钱，但是使用该应用程序的人们已经开始弄清楚如何以多种有用的方式来使用它。 人们经常讨论Twitter如何允许毫秒级的新闻周期，以及如何从当地公民记者那里获得新闻提示。 但是，Twitter和旨在影响社会变革的项目也将Twitter用于受控新闻和信息的收集。
The best early example of this, is probably conservative blogger Patrick Ruffini’s Twittering Iowa project earlier this year. Ruffini set up a special Twitter account during the Iowa caucuses last January and asked readers who were attending the actual caucus sites to Twitter early results during the actual caucus. The result was that Ruffini was able to see the trend toward a Barack Obama victory hours before the press confirmed it.
最好的早期例子就是今年早些时候保守派博客作者帕特里克·鲁菲尼(Patrick Ruffini)的Twittering Iowa项目 。 鲁菲尼(Ruffini)在去年1月的爱荷华州预备会议期间设立了一个特殊的Twitter帐户，并向参加实际预备会议站点的读者询问实际预备会议期间Twitter的早期结果。 结果是鲁菲尼能够在媒体确认前几个小时就看到巴拉克·奥巴马获胜的趋势。
More recently, political technology blog techPresident is planning to use Twitter and special hashtags to form a network of volunteers who can watch polling places for signs of fraudulent voting activity and instantly report back over Twitter. TwitterVoteReport.com lays out their plans. “Imagine a Nationwide web map with pins identifying every zip code where Americans are waiting over 30 minutes to vote or indicating those election districts where the voting machines are not working,” they write. “Collectively we will inform each other when when the lines too long and ensure that media and watchdog groups know where problems exist.”
最近，政治技术博客techPresident计划使用Twitter和特殊的标签建立一个志愿者网络，这些志愿者可以观察民意调查地点的欺诈性投票活动迹象，并立即通过Twitter进行举报。 TwitterVoteReport.com列出了他们的计划。 他们写道：“想象一下，一张遍布全国的网络地图，上面的图钉标识了美国人等待30分钟以上投票的每个邮政编码，或者指出了投票机不起作用的那些选举区。” “当线路太长时，我们将集体通知对方，并确保媒体和看门狗组织知道问题出在哪里。”
There were actually problems in Florida today at some polling places where early voting began — so there is clearly a need for this sort of monitoring. A project like techPresident’s works extremely well at keeping track of these types t of issues for the same reasons that Twitter works so well as an instant, early news distribution platform:
如今， 在佛罗里达州早早开始投票的某些投票站中实际上存在问题 -因此显然需要这种监视。 像techPresident的项目在跟踪这些类型的问题方面表现出色，其原因与Twitter作为一个即时的早期新闻发布平台一样运作良好的原因相同：
It’s fast.
它很快。
It’s open.
它是开放的。
It’s easy.
这很容易。
It’s two way.
这是两种方式。
Twitter works well as a vehicle for news or data gathering because it allows researchers or organizers to crowdsource those tasks and create a network that can pull in information faster and cover more ground than a single reporter, or even a team of reporters could. One of the downsides of Twitter is that it is rather jumbled — there’s a high ratio of noise to signal. But as the above examples show, with some specifically directed tweeting or clever use of hashtags, sorting the valuable data from the garbage isn’t very difficult.
Twitter可以很好地用作新闻或数据收集的工具，因为它使研究人员或组织者可以众包这些任务，并创建一个网络，该网络可以更快地获取信息，并且覆盖的范围比单个记者甚至一个记者团队都多。 Twitter的缺点之一是它比较混乱-噪声与信号的比率很高。 但是，如以上示例所示，通过使用特定的定向推文或巧妙地使用＃标签，从垃圾中分类有价值的数据并不是很困难。
techPresident is also proposing a way to use Twitter to keep track of intrusive robocalls.
techPresident还提出了一种使用Twitter来跟踪侵入式robocall的方法 。
Twitter isn’t the only site getting in on the social change act. A lot of social networking sites are beginning to be leveraged for community organizing and data gathering. YouTube, for example, is urging voters in the US to video their vote as a way to monitor and minimize potential vote fraud. Last February, an anti-FARC group in Columbia used Facebook to help organize hundreds of thousands of protesters in just a couple of days.
Twitter不是唯一一个参与社会变革法案的网站。 许多社交网站开始被用于社区组织和数据收集。 例如，YouTube敦促美国选民观看他们的投票视频，以监控并最大程度地减少潜在的选票欺诈行为。 去年2月，哥伦比亚反哥伦比亚革命武装组织利用Facebook在短短几天内帮助组织了数十万示威者。
This sort of rapid data gathering and social organizing simply wasn’t possible a couple of years ago. Patrick Ruffini, writing at techPresident shortly after his Twittering Iowa project, concluded that Twitter “open sources the process of developing ideas and gathering news tips, giving us a complete window onto the news cycle,” and predicted that Twitter would be the breakout tool of this election cycle.
这种快速的数据收集和社交组织几年前是不可能的。 帕特里克·鲁菲尼(Patrick Ruffini) 在推特爱荷华州(Twitter)衣阿华(Iowa)项目结束后不久在techPresident撰文 ，得出的结论是，推特(Twitter)“开源了发展思想和收集新闻提示的过程，为我们提供了进入新闻周期的完整窗口”，并预测Twitter将是该技术的突破性工具。这个选举周期。
While that’s not totally clear — and certainly isn’t true from a campaigning perspective — Twitter and social tools are definitely becoming invaluable pieces of technology for agents of social change.
尽管这还不是很清楚-从竞选的角度来看当然也不是正确的-Twitter和社交工具无疑已成为推动社会变革的技术的无价之宝。
翻译自: https://www.sitepoint.com/twitter-as-a-tool-for-social-change/
