@DonnieWahlberg and other life saving Twitter stories
"The real life savers are the people who donate organs & the doctors! All I did was help get the message to them," he added.
Demi Moore retweets suicidal post
It might have been easy to ignore an 18-year-old's tweet or think it was a joke, but Demi Moore's quick retweet action helped save his life. The teen tweeted, "I'm about to go hang myself from a tree outside my house and end my life. I have no reason to live anymore," adding that he would livestream his attempt. Moore replied, "Hope you are joking," and retweeted the post. After seeing the tweet in their feed, fans reached out to the police and suicide prevention hotlines. It helped authorities find the boy, who suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder, at his home. He admitted he posted the tweet and was considering harmful behavior, and the authorities were able to get him to the proper care. Reporter uses Twitter to convince U.S. Air Force to allow Doctors With Out Borders plane in Haiti Reporter Ann Curry was browsing Twitter when she came across an appeal from Jason Cone, Doctors Without Borders' communications director. Cone had been trying to get a Doctors Without Borders plane full of medical professionals into Haiti to help with the earthquake relief. The problem: The U.S. military took control of Haiti's Port-Au-Prince airfield and began prioritizing incoming flights, and the Doctors Without Borders plane wasn't high on the list. Cone did what he knew best and released a press release, but decided to try a new tactic and tweet the situation. Curry read his tweets, and using her journalistic prowess, she got in touch with Pentagon officials -- via tweet at first -- and convinced them to land the help. She wrote: "@usairforce find a way to let Doctors without Borders planes land in Haiti: http://bit.ly/8hYZOKTHE most effective at this." Twitter is "our best option - maybe our first option from now on" for getting a message out during a crisis, Cone said, according to Smart Blog. Curry's tweet was ranked the most powerful of 2010 by Twitter. Student caught in Egyptian jail tweets his way outUC Berkeley graduate student James Karl Buck was in Mahalla, Egypt covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested. Luckily, Buck was able to keep his phone so he tweeted one word, "Arrested." Ot started a chain reaction from friends and family who were able to alert the authorities and officials and start spreading the word of his detainment.
Finally, Buck tweeted the word everyone was waiting for, "Free," but unfortunately, he lost track of his translator who was transferred to another jail. Maree was eventually released three months later, thanks to Buck's and other people's online petitions.
"Usually the first thing the police go for is the detainees' cameras and cellular phones," Hossam el-Hamalaw, a Cairo-based reporter in Berkeley, Calif. who helped spread word of the case by blogging his Tweets, said to CNN. "I'm surprised they left James with his phone." I guess they underestimated the power of talking thumbs.