Twitter, News, Responsibility
So many issues to think about in the wake of the Mumbai massacre. Here is one of them: the flow of information in a fast-moving crisis when everyone has a cell phone. In the recent California fires, Twitter seemed to be a good thing, because no matter who you are as a Twitter-er, a forest fire bearing down on you is the enemy, and you need all the info about it you can get, and so do your fellow Twitter users anywhere near the crisis.
But Mumbai was a military style attack, and those carrying out the attack were surely monitoring Twitter, for their own uses. Some citizens in Mumbai were acting as reporters on Twitter, honestly reporting things they saw in front of them. Rumors also arose and were repeated (re-tweeted). What should TV networks do with that information? What should police/military do? What should civilian Twitter readers believe? If you witnessed such a crisis happening, i.e. if you were an eyewitness, what would you report? Not that anyone could really answer this ahead of time. But it’s worth thinking about.
Category: Catch-All
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In emergency situations, where there isn’t enough time to verify the myriad of tweets, blog posts, etc; rumors can be taken as fact and fact can be taken as rumors. It’s going to be a mix.
Most people listening to the news networks are going to hold them to a higher standard of truth. Once it’s said on a news broadcast, people feel it’s true and that they are free to spread the information. If rumors slip in, everyone tuned in will believe them. I think it’s dangerous for news networks to use this information.
Those seeking additional info should do the searching themselves. They should weed out what is fact and what is fiction. It’s easier for them to realize and admit that they believed rumors, than for a news network to retract the info.
It’s a question of standards. They are lower for twitter, far too low to be relied upon by news networks.
Twitter, much like blogs, can give you a bit of an insight into the pulse of something and perhaps a trend or a bit of information. If something pops up two or three times, it may be really worth looking into. But networks (and individuals) must be careful not to buy in too early without doing their own bit of research for fear of being gamed. Just because something is mentioned a lot by the same five people doesn’t mean it’s true let alone news.
I think what Twitter does is help internationalize what would normally be local rumors. On September 11th there were tons of rumors running around DC as to what was happening at any given moment and it led to a lot of questions locally, but many of those rumors never made it out of DC. In this day and age they’d make it out and probably be reported as news, but they could just as easily be disproven as well.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/12/02/mehta.mumbai/index.html