When all this is behind us, years from now, I'd love to look back and fully investigate the role social media played in this whole thing, especially if tweets end up being evidence. I started my career doing fairly old-school PR, where NOTHING hit the airwaves without being approved by several folks up the totem pole. It's so crazy to me how little people consider the longevity of internet content and how quickly information is disseminated online, especially when you have upwards of thousands of followers. I worked at one of the bigger tech companies in town for a long time and wrote their first set of social media guidelines (which I'm sure have been updated since then) and 99.9% of the shit I see these morons post violates basic, BASIC tenets of social media use when users affiliate themselves with the companies they work for. I first heard of Twitter at SXSW in 2007, when someone described it to me as something you'd use to basically mass-text your friends and arrange spontaneous get-togethers or let people know where you were, using basic location services. I bet that for all their forward-thinking mindsets, the founders of Twitter never predicted the critical role it would take in affecting news dissemination and politics.