How to find info thru Twitter: lesson I learned from Leslie (@1txsage1957), Libero (@ldellapiana), & Eric (@ebrooks)

Sometimes people comment about my ability to find important news and information that is not available elsewhere.

I really learned this skill from 3 of my oldest Twitter friends, people on Twitter who were here before me: Leslie (@1txsage1957), Libero (@ldellapiana), and Eric (@ebrooks)

I noticed that they were coming up with news stories that were simply not available to me in the mainstream media.

From their work I learned that Twitter was a great tool for finding the news that's hard to find.

I started (a) doing keyword searches for topics that were of interest, following the people I found who tweeted good material, (b) following people who were retweeted consistently, and (c) following the RSS feeds of some of the more interesting websites to which my tweets had led me. These made twitter a powerful tool for finding the stuff that doesn't make it into the mainstream media and the mainstream history books.

I learned the importance of this firsthand in 2004, when I was basically an eyewitness to massive election fraud taking place in Ohio during the presidential election. The Ohio media were reporting on it, but the mainstream national media had adopted a "company line", creating a fictionalized version of what had occurred. I assume they did so because they thought the American people "can't handle the truth".

In 2009 the US "mainstream media" suppressed information about the all important protests of the indigenous rainforest peoples of Peru, who were standing up against their government's illegal attempt to confiscate most of the remaining Peruvian rainforest for the benefit of oil and other mineral exploration interests. These humble people were waging a struggle not just for themselves but for all mankind. Not a single mainstream US media source covered the story. Had they been covering it, the bloodshed which ensued -- a massacre which appeared to include the hunting of unarmed people with machine guns from helicopters supplied to Peru by the US -- might have been averted. The only major media coverage of the protests was in the UK.

Only after the massacre had ensued, did the US media give any coverage, and it was slight, begrudging, and falsely reported.

So I continue to look for the real news. And Twitter helps me do it.

And I can thank Leslie, Libero, and Eric for showing me the way.

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