It’s everywhere – you can’t escape it’s grip these days. I’m talking about Twitter. The social-networking, news flash, advertising, marketing and rumor spreading tool available to the SMS Generation. Now with the entire western world painting their avatars green while looking at Iran and feeling very compassionate for the people albeit staying inactive, twitter rises to stellar levels of importance. Formerly reliable news sources like CNN base their reporting entirely on information relayed via twitter. No one can confirm twitter reports, no one can really be sure that what the people tweet and retweet, tag and fight down is real information. I was always weary of rumors and misinformation and twitter is just the perfect tool for that. With all the hype going on around twitter, the New York Times published an interesting piece about the implications of twitter as a news source:
Even Twitter accounts seen as promoting the protest movement in Iran are largely a series of links to photographs hosted on other sites or brief updates on strategy. Each update may not be important. Collectively, however, the tweets can create a personality or environment that reflects the emotions of the moment and helps drive opinion.[...]
Nothing on Twitter has been verified. While users can learn from experience to trust a certain Twitter account, it is still a matter of trust. And just as Twitter has helped get out first-hand reports from Tehran, it has also spread inaccurate information, perhaps even disinformation. [...]
Not only is it hard to be sure that what appears on Twitter is accurate, but some Twitterers may even be trying to trick you. [...]
For all the democratic traits of Twitter, not all users are equal. A popular, trusted user matters more and, as shown above, can expose others who are suspected of being fakers. In that way, Twitter is a community, with leaders and cliques[...]
I can highly recommend reading this article. News sources like the huffingtonpost habe a live blogging service running about the Iran elections. The majority of information there is based on twitter accounts, but not all gets to be posted, the authors selects according on who’s talking. Like the NYT correctly pointed out, only some trusted sources trusted and their tweets are repeated by the users until they have reached a brought audience, and then they get repeated some more. Basically in it’s initial state, twitter is an anarchy but now the beginnings of a basic evolution can be witnessed. Twitter could proof to be an interesting field for socio-analysts and evolutionary biologists. The survival of the fittest is an emerging concept in who is to be trusted and whose information is valuable. In the past, the who screamed the loudest wasn’t always right, but heard by the most people. With twitter it’s the same thing. Also, somehow twitter and all it’s concept of tags and twibe remind me of a blown up german child game called “Stille post”, where kids sit in a circle and one of them comes up with a message, which is whispered into each others ear, carried from child to child. At the the end the sender receives the outcome and most of the times the message had changed drastically. The more complex it was, the more likely the message was changes. Also the characters of the children played a role, wether or not they liked the sender or the message, it was altered or passed on as good as possible. On twitter the same mutations to a message might happen.
I conducted a little experiment last week. When a friend informed me that Dell earned 2 million dollars with their outlet on twitter I wanted to see if I could use that potential for myself. So I tweeted several times last week about an virtual offer for a professional photo shooting with 20% discount for those referring to twitter. I gained some new followers, but no one answered me. Does that mean my offer sucked? Most likely not. I think no one reacted because I don’t have a “name” on twitter, no professional background in my past tweets leading to the assumption I could be a professional photographer or maybe as simple as that no one in Koblenz really uses twitter, especially not the usual target group of young females who regard themselves as (too) pretty.
Another thing about twitter became clear to me when I used a iPhone client for accessing the network. While I was browsing through the tweets marked with #IranElection I stumbled across an ad:
Some marketer was clever enough to program his bot to insert the most popular tags into the ad. Besides all the grave rumors coming from Iran suddenly you see this ad. It feels wrong, it looks wrong. Yet somehow it’s fitting in there so well. While a user passionately retweets false rumors about tanks in Teheran, someone else tells you about a free domain. Those two bits of information live happily side by side. Another funny detail, the user “iransource” is being defamed all the time as a pro-regime agent, using twitter to spread propaganda. There you have the full story of twitter in one tiny screenshot. Judge for yourself if you would like that as a news source.
How in the world are we normal information consumers supposed to differentiate between what’s right or wrong. The world was never more in the need of good, well researched, solid journalism than now. In this world of twitter the who is the fastest wins, not the one who takes time to research and look through things. In this world, those with half-knowledge win, those who scream the loudest win. I don’t like this development, not a tiny bit – and yet I have to admit is hard not to jump on the bandwagon and retweet the gravest or most fascinating information bits I come across, tweet about my breakfast or tweet to make people jealous when I do really cool stuff.
Thanks for an interesting post, Gunnar.
“The world was never more in the need of good, well researched, solid journalism than now.”
I couldn’t agree with that sentence more. Not just because I’m a journalist myself, but because globalisation has not only made people trade with each other more but also made people care about each other more.
This debate is just like the one about blogging that’s been running in the media world for years now. Blogs and tweets and Youtube videos can sometimes be the only source of information (when the media are thrown out), and I think that as long as the news media approach the information with a certain distance (“Users on Twitter write that…”), they are truly helpful tools for obtaining information in a globalised media world.
Just like you, I hope that some users/twitterers will earn credibility along the way, and I hope that the huge and exlosive amount of bloggers and twitterers will make the readers more and more skeptic and aware of the flaws and thus more critical.
I try to be optimistic in general (except about Comic Sans that will eventually send us all to hell), and my hope is that the more information that’s out there, the better the media and the recipients will be at filtering the crap from the credible.
Wow, thank you Vinh for this comment. I’m always glad to receive comments and especially from you who I respect for his knowledge. No kidding.
About your comment, I join you in your optimistic hope that people will learn to work with and filter the massive amount of information coming from new sources like twitter. Newspapers, over the years, moved to certain niches, lived on their reputations and target audiences. Now something like twitter demands close attention on whose talking and it will take time to really categorize it at what it really is (or is twitter a new kind of press and itself just a tool free of categorization?)
My fear though is that not all, better most, people won’t have the time nor the will to analyze who’s talking and just “swallow” what they get to eat information wise. The CNN iReport thing was already a step in the wrong direction. Then again I know that in the US some blogs are powerful political opinion leaders and can be trusted. But how do the people active in such blogs get paid?
So it could go both ways, either we sink into a see of online media that lives on clicks and thus mostly talks about celebrities and popular items or a new culture of news emerges, free of agencies, filtered only through gained reputation by those who relay it and thus more honest and direct. I hope for the prevailing of second way, but as everybody gotta make a living, I don’t see yet how that will play out. Getting informed and passing information takes time and effort, more than 140 characters.
[...] deep insights into twitter and its social implication in my previous post on to something lighter. Let’s look at some pictures. Recently I travelled to South East [...]