Wednesday, December 01, 2010

#insensitive

When PCSO announced there was one person who won the Grand Lotto 6/55 jackpot of more than 700 million pesos Twitter was abuzz! Everybody was talking about it and it was actually fun with all the jokes about being bitter about it but self-proclaimed "eventologist" Tim Yap tweeted the following words (he already deleted the original tweet about it so I' can't link it and will just use this screen cap from Batangas Today)





“Eto na, PCSO confirms one winner—his name is Miko Morelos. He gets to take home the P741.2M peso Grand Lotto 6/55 Jackpot! #magtagokana"

What's worse is that he followed this tweet up with this

“And guess what? Miko Morelos is on twitter! @mikomorelos I already sent a request. He protected his tweets already. #afraidforhislife,”

This was the original tweet from Philippine Daily Inquirer

"#Lotto one winner from Luzon confirmed (Miko Morelos)"

PDI was simply attributing Miko Morelos as the source of the news. While I understand how this tweet could be misinterpreted it still does not give Tim Yap or anyone for that matter the right to announce to the world wide web who won that huge amount of money! The jackpot is HUGE and for crying out loud anyone who will win this will be put to danger if a lot people will know his identity.

Tim Yap apologized today via Twitter

"It was an honest mistake. My apologies if any of you were offended by the mistweet, although I clarified it in my next tweets that Mr. Morelos wasn't the winner but the reporter who covered the lotto proceedings. I tweeted those messages without any malice or ill intentions. I have already spoken to Mr. Morelos and personally apologized to him"

You know what this "mistweet" was simply not an "honest mistake", the fact that he used the hash tags "#magtagokana" and "#afraidforhislife" showed that he KNEW that there's DANGER to that person who won the jackpot but he still tweeted it anyway. Why did he do that? I don't know maybe because it's coooool!

You might think that I have no sense of humor whatsoever but this situation is different my friends. We could easily toss jokes around about having that a lot of money is dangerous but let's face the reality, there are news of people getting killed when they refused to give their cellphones to thieves so what danger could a person who won 700 million pesos can face?! It's simply no joking matter.

Miko Morelos shared his thoughts about the whole brouhaha on the Inquirer today and I totally understand what the guy is feeling right now. The damage had been done just because of a person who got "too excited" to use his brains.

And I definitely agree with Morelos' final statement on his piece today

"What bothers me is how people take information at face value, without reading or even processing these bits to form a coherent thought. Is this a sign of the times that people aren’t thinking critically anymore?"

I mean, come on how could the PCSO possibly know the name of the winner of the jackpot just minutes after the numbers are drawn out? When you bet for lotto you don't leave your name and even if they do why on earth would PCSO disclose the name of the winner? Have they ever done that in the past? Of course not! It's really scary how people are so gullible these days and will easily believe what they read just because it was from someone famous. It really just boils down to common sense which sadly a lot of people don't have apparently.

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