German media continues to demonize social media

A few years ago it was the German media proclaimed that blogs had no future simply because they would give away too much information about the users and that they could not be kept private.

I have found my blog to be a most valuable platform – and so do my over 5000 subscribers.

Yesterday I was shocked to see that they haven’t learned and that the witch-hunt seems to continue: only with a different “witch”.

Now German media outlets, especially the Westdeutscher-Rundfunk (Government-related tv station), has repeatedly aired programs which totally falsify information in context to social networks.

Therein they stated that the information which people upload and enter on to social networks are indexed by search engines instead of the truth that they are only searchable if I the user decide that they should be.

A long line of arguments followed, totally torn out of context, but the primary indicators that this piece of “information” was not really true was that Facebook had 2 million members.

While this may be true for Germans registered on Facebook it was not mentioned by the network that they have a few million more.

If this trend of negative propaganda should continue I think a lot of German companies will endanger their competitiveness on the global markets as they have done with not embracing blogs. Most German companies could be doing better in terms of search engine score and public relations work if they were to utilize these and other great instruments out there.

Let’s see what the next trend in 2010 will be and what stories German media outlets will come up with to demonize those.

Lars Hilse