Twitter: Reliable?

Twitter has come so far since six years ago when it began. There are more than 140 million active users, and there are about 340 million tweets per day.

But what are people tweeting about?

Sure, some are tweeting about what is going on in their lives. But sometimes we get some tweets that may not be true, and they can become a problem. It especially affects how much we trust the media. Someone can tweet a bad rumor about someone, and it can spread like wildfire.  Things get around more quickly and spread out farther than any other social networking site. And sometimes someone will post something that may be true, but it can lead to make a stretched truth or mess with someone’s reputation.

Take the political events happening now. USA Today journalist Paul Singer wrote: "Within 15 minutes after the first tweet by @InvisibleObama, the account had been mentioned on Twitter by Mental Floss magazine, the news website Salon, and Washington Post political reporter Chris Cillizza and columnist Ezra Klein, according to data supplied by social media analysis firm Radian 6. Those four media accounts have more than a million followers combined."

If this was said back when online social media wasn’t as common, the Big Bird issue wouldn’t have been such a big issue. People would not have thought much on what Romney said. But people’s responses went around so much that it seemed like a much more important issue. And it was taken out of context. This also happened with the “binders full of women” issue from the second presidential debate as well as the “malarkey” situation from the vice-presidential debate.

Word gets around more quickly these days, but sometimes it is to our disadvantage.