Grappling with Tweetstorms

IN the world of hashtags and retweets, the Tweetstorm finally made its way to Singapore's shores on Wednesday. Of it, the poet TS Eliot might have been tempted to recycle a line: This is the way a storm breaks - not with a bang but a whimper.

For the benefit of the wider world where pronouncements of any weight tend to contain more than 140 characters, a Tweetstorm is essentially an online protest. Twitter users collectively adopt a cause, craft a message and send out Tweets at an appointed time, the barrage of messages creating a "storm", as it were.

On Wednesday, the cause that made its rounds here was for the release of five men charged with vandalism that made references to hacktivist collective Anonymous. The response can be charitably described as limp - fewer than 100 Tweets bearing the requisite hashtag were sent. It bears pointing out that a brief spike occurred on Wednesday night after a regulator's press briefing brought the campaign to mainstream attention.