My hometown, Dearborn, MI, is currently the center of a lot of media created controversy. Terry Jones is in town. Regardless of your opinions on him or what he represents I think the topic offers an interesting insight into how social media platforms are used.  

Fox2Detroit had a live stream of a court case regarding a protest he wanted to hold in the city. At one point they had embedded both a Facebook live chat tool, and a Twitter widget that simply filtered on the #TerryJones hashtag. It was obvious to me when I first saw both that the Twitter stream was alarmingly racist and had degraded to the Twitter equivalent of a flame war.  Facebook wasn’t a model for public discourse itself, but it was markably better. When I came back today, the Twitter stream had been removed from the site.

I think this provides some interesting insights into how both platforms are used and can be used effectively by media organizations.  It reminds me of the TechCrunch facebook comments debate.