Wikileaks: Pr through social media

Wikileaks is a non profit organisation that publishes secret government secrets from anonymous sources. The organisation was set up by Australian Julian Assange in 2006 and since then has been routinely publishing government secrets from many different countries most notably the United States Of America. This has led to many calling for Assanges's arrest and since 2012 he has lived in the embassy of Ecuador in London to avoid extradition to the USA. Wikileaks, like many other organisations chooses social media as its direct communicator to the public. Wikileaks , however is no ordinary organisation. Wikileaks mainly uses Facebook and Twitter as it's main methods of communication. Both pages are used for the release of sensitive information and also acts as a PR template for the organisation

  The Facebook page has over 3.6 million likes while its Twitter page has over 4 million followers

Both pages serve a similar purpose and it's posts reach a huge amount of people. Wikileaks dose not directly communicate with its public however, they publish information and for the most part let the viewer decipher the message thats been released. 

Julian Assange, founder of wikileaks has not been seen alive since the start of October with many followers fearing he may be dead or that he may have come to harm. Wikileaks designed what is known as a dead man's switch into Twitter and Facebook and they warned if Assange comes to harm at any time they would activate it. The dead man's switch is essentially a threat to upload a large amount of very sensitive information to the internet in the event of Assange's death and followers of Wikileaks have noted a large increase in activity in the past few months with many fearing the dead man switch may have been activated.

To date information on Assange has been hard to come by except for the odd post about him on Wikileaks Facebook page

  Its still unconfirmed whether he is dead or alive although what we do know is that Wikileaks use of social media is truly unique and almost unheard of. They have used social media in a completely new way using it as a platform to release government secrets that would have been almost impossible to get hold of before the digital age. They have in many ways reinvented how social media can be used by organisations and proven it can be used not just for PR but to bring about change and even perhaps bring down governments. Social media is fast becoming not just a tool for PR but a vast resource for change and Wikileaks arent the first nor the last to exploit it in this way.

References:

 https://www.facebook.com/wikileaks/?fref=ts

http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/01/14/what-do-social-media-and-wikileaks-have-in-common/

https://twitter.com/wikileaks?lang=en