If you enjoy getting your news in 140 characters or less, consider this. Errors and factually incorrect reports are being re-tweeted every day on Twitter.com and some are wondering if there is any way to curb the spread of misinformation without inhibiting Twitter's constant data flow.
According to Mathew Ingram, writing for BusinessWeek, Twitter has become a real-time news network because of such incidents as the earthquake in Haiti, the recent revolution in Tunisia, and the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona. He likens it to a version of CNN but powered by hundreds of thousands of users around the world.
But what happens when that Twitter news network is spreading misinformation? Ingram points out that’s what happened during the Giffords shooting, when the congresswoman was initially reported to be dead. There are more examples, such as this week’s reports of a shooting in London’s Oxford Circus that turned out to be false only after sweeping through the Twitter-sphere.
According to a number of reports, the British incident appears to have been caused by two coincidental events. One was an e-mail about a police training exercise involving a shooting in Oxford Circus, which somehow got into the wrong hands and was posted as though it were the real thing. Meanwhile, another Twitter user posted an unrelated message about a TV commercial "shooting" in the area, and the combination of those two things helped fan the flames of hysteria for a number of hours about buildings being locked down and police sharpshooters being brought in.
Ingram says that In the case of Representative Giffords (D-Ariz.), a number of outlets reported in the minutes following the initial reports of the shooting that the congresswoman had been killed. These reports made their way onto Twitter — in some cases because the reporters for those news outlets posted them, and in other cases because users heard or saw the reports and then tweeted about them.
For hours after the shooting, these erroneous reports continued to circulate, even after the reporters and media outlets themselves had posted corrections.
"Untweet?"
This, says Ingram, led to a discussion by a number of journalists in the days that followed about how to handle an incorrect tweet. Should it be deleted, to prevent the error from being circulated any further? A number of reporters and bloggers said that it should — but others, such as Salon founder Scott Rosenberg argue that the error should be allowed to remain, but that whoever posted it should do their best to update Twitter with the correct information.
Craig Silverman of Regret The Error, who wrote a post cataloguing the erroneous reports, has also described a way in which Twitter could implement a correction function by tying any correction to the original tweet. Ingram says the problem with this approach, is that Twitter is, by definition, a stream of content. It never stops flowing, and during breaking news events, it flows so quickly it's almost impossible to filter it all or be sure of what is correct and what isn't. And because it's an asynchronous experience — meaning people step away from it and then come back repeatedly. Therefore, there is no way to guarantee that everyone is going to see an update or a correction or to stop them from re-tweeting incorrect information.
It's possible that Twitter might be able either to embed corrections or to tie errors and updates together using its so-called Annotations feature, which the company was working on last year and had originally hoped to launch in the fall. But work on that project was apparently put on hold while the company launched a revamped website version of the service and sorted out some other matters.
According to Ingram, it's not clear whether Annotations will be revived, but the idea behind it was that information about a tweet — or "metadata," such as location or a number of other variables — could be attached to it as it travelled through the network. Something like that might work for corrections as well.
The Twitter problem isn't a new one. Traditional media have struggled with the issue for years. Remember the days when newspapers ran headlines of a losing candidate winning? Or if a paper makes a mistake in an article, a correction might appear days later, but how many people read the corrections page?
In a sense, Twitter is like a real-time, distributed version of a wire service, such as Reuters or Dow Jones. When they post something that is wrong, they simply send out an update to their customers and hope no one has published it in the paper or online yet.
Twitter's great strength is that it allows anyone to publish, and re-publish, information instantly and distribute that information to thousands of people within minutes. But when a mistake gets distributed, there's no single source that can send out a correction.
Ingram says that's the double-edged sword such a network represents. Perhaps — since we all make up this real-time news network — it's incumbent on all of us to do the correcting, even if it's just by re-tweeting corrections and updates as eagerly as we re-tweeted the original.
