public safety & preparedness campaign asks drivers to tweet, putting safety at risk

before 6 am of april 2, saw this tweet by @IMReadyPH of GMA News & Public Affairs of the country’s largest TV network GMA 7. it was asking those who were commuting and driving to tweet the traffic situation on the roads they were travelling.

 

 

traffic is an on-going problem in metro manila. social media has also been a popular way to get information for many in the city. but the problem was @IMReadyPH was asking those driving to send tweets. driving and texting at the same time is a very dangerous thing to do. tweeting, getting your cellphone and looking at it and spending time, even just seconds to send a tweet can cause major accidents for the driver and those around the person sending the tweet. it means the driver is distracting himself, taking off his concentration from the road and a much bigger risk, the driver takes his eye off the road.

we replied to that tweet of @IMReadyPH and called its attention to what it did with its tweet – asking drivers to tweet is like inviting road accidents to happen. the twitter account did not reply to us. instead, we saw another twitter account replying with a traffic situation where he was. to that, @IMReadyPH advised the twitter account to “be careful”.

 

reading what the twitter account @IMReadyPh is all about, we were shocked to read that it is “the official public safety and preparedness campaign of GMA News & Public Affairs – for safe and convenient living“. (underscoring ours)

it is ironical or maybe a real failure for this “public safety” twitter account of GMA7 to tweet and ask people to be unsafe by asking them to tweet and drive at the same time.

at around the same time, i encountered on twitter some statistics from the US on the real risks of texting and driving. the data is sobering and clearly states the high risk that driving and texting has. we sent the same infographics to @IMReadyPH but we did not get any response. i thought being a “public safety” twitter account, it will acknowledge the infographics, retweet it to its followers and even apologize for what it had sent out in twitter earlier. none of that happened.

 

social media, specially a twitter account is very popular among philippine media. twitter has immediacy, you can send out news bits in practically real time plus it has a very wide reach among pinoys. in fact many pinoys get news on on-going news events from twitter at times faster and definitely much better than the traditional media of TV and even radio.

but that should not stay there. media outlets should understand and have the competency on the twitter accounts they set up. this one was for “public safety”, it needs to understand what that means and apply its mandate in every tweet it does.

this one was obviously a failure, a big WAWAM!