Calamities and global (social) media response

Today we ‘had’ or should I say are witnessing another calamity, this time at our national pride and joy: Schiphol airport, and along with our sincere wishes that everyone who’s still stuck over there will get out unharmed we really want to see how ‘the’ media picked it up.

Netherlands – Tom Scheffers reporting

After the news of the bomb threat reached Twitter. the hashtags #schiphol and #bommelding became trending topics. The first tweet was from a guy waiting to get on his plain to Nice, France. A sudden evacuation might interrupt his flight. after his tweet, many people retweeted him. Most of these people were people located at or near Schiphol Airport, or newshunters.
The first tweet regarding this case was around 11:00 am, Schiphol's first tweet about this subject was around 2:40 pm…

All these people talking about the situation, wondering what's happening and speculating on different possible situations does not make news clear. Shouldn't Schiphol directly interact on Twitter to make things clear during situations like these? In the meanwhile, when things were happening, @schipholjobs twittered about aviation news and airplane market…

China - Kelly Ge reporting

I searched the word “Dutch airport bomb” on Baidu on 13:35 Dutch time, and did see many related news. The quickest one released around 12:45. Many did not follow very quickly, see screenshot below:

Those results are from some big portal websites, but the traditional mainstream medias still did not pick it up right now. I also checked the tweets from Sina Weibo(biggest market share), and the earlist tweets is at 12:08, which is almost half an hour earlier than the first tweet. From the photo, I guess that the person may be at the airport at that time, but not sure, for he posted another message at 2:05, saying that the alarm has been released. Maybe not so many are interested, so the total number of  retweets are only 41 till now.

 

First Tweet on Sina Weibo

Indonesia - Vitto Christaldi reporting

"The bomb threat news, on the other hand, still (13:41) has not been picked by any Indonesian news agency. Up to this moment, no related news show up when the keywords “bomb”, “schiphol”, Amsterdam” and “threat” (in Indonesian language) is put on Google Indonesia. The Indonesian news source in the Netherlands, Radio Nederland Wereldomroep, has also not published any news or comment about the bomb threat until this article is written.

The same goes to social media. So far, I have not seen any tweets from Indonesia about the bomb threat in Schiphol Airport. I guess, bomb threat in an airport in Amsterdam is not very interesting for the country with more than 20 million Twitter users."

When I googled ‘ancaman bom amsterdam’ bombthreat amsterdam I saw this on Google:

Russia - Tamara Yadvichuk reporting

In Russia and CIS countries news spreads fast. Russian-speaking twitter started tweeting about the bomb threat in Schiphol less than two hours after the first tweet had appeared and it has already been picked up by numerous online news sources. It seems that the first one to bring the news to the Russian-speaking audience was the Russian version of BBC, which posted a message at 10:49 GMT.

Vkontakte, the Russian social-media giant with over 150 million registered users, so far has only one post on the topic – by Anastasia Sergeeva, a student from St. Petersburg who was at the airport at the time of the event. After all, for its numerous users VKontakte is an entertainment and socializing platform rather than a news source – the message which became an immediate sensation on twitter received just 3 comments on Vkontakte.

Conclusions anyone…please let us know.