Twue or False: Twitter Turns Hearsay into Headlines

Justin Bieber has died several more times than an 18 year old pop sensation can reasonably expect. That is, according to posts on Twitter. On a bad day in June 2011, he died twice – once murdered by his publicist and once killed in a car accident. For those who depend on Twitter headlines for their news, such stories can often be indistinguishable from real breaking news. Reports of Whitney Houston’s passing first appeared on a Twitter account with a mere fourteen followers. The death of Amy Winehouse circulated on Twitter for 40 minutes before BBC confirmed the news.

Despite common celebrity death hoaxes, Twitter has become a major conduit for big breaking news. Witnesses tweeted pictures of the 2009 US Airways plane on the Hudson River just minutes after its emergency landing. The 2010 Arab Spring uprisings were heavily reported on Twitter, with many using it not only to cover the protests but also to facilitate them. It has become a news site that not only reports the news, but that also creates it.

The speed and scope of Twitter are irrevocably changing the news environment. It’s caused journalism to accelerate rapidly, but while it enables journalists to find new stories and get them out quickly, it also means that they are competing with non-industry tweeters who happen to be in the right place at the right time.

Yet journalists writing on the subject have largely agreed that Twitter complements those sources rather than outdating them. In gathering real-time news, it can be a powerful tool for journalists, rather than a competitor. As traditional publishers have increasingly incorporated the social network along with other new media forms into their activity, concerns over Twitter’s immediacy have lost momentum.

Yet in their eagerness to gather news with the help of new media, traditional news sources with established reputations can fall victim to the unreliability evidenced by Twitter’s highly inaccurate celebrity death count. Mistaking Twitter rumours for news does the news industry a great disservice. Andy Carvin, senior strategist at American news network NPR, used Twitter to provide frequent updates on the situations in Tunisia and Egypt in 2010 and 2011 with great success – but had to be careful to distinguish between raw data and news. He told GigaOM’s Matthew Ingram, “I get uncomfortable when people refer to my Twitter feed as a newswire. It’s not a newswire. It’s a newsroom. It’s where I’m trying to separate fact from fiction, interacting with people. That’s a newsroom.”

Without mediation and editorial stages, problems are resolved in public rather than in the newsroom. On Twitter, fact-checking may consist of followers replying with corrections rather than editors making changes pre-publication. When a BBC Newsnight report on child abuse in north Wales implicated a senior Conservative from the Thatcher era, widespread speculation from tweeters named a former government minister, falsely alleging that he was the perpetrator. He has since assembled a legal team and claims to have a list of over 10,000 Twitter users who defamed him, including high profile political, media and entertainment personalities, that he intends to sue. As his solicitor pointed out: “Twitter is not a place where you can gossip and say the nastiest things possible with impunity.”

Twitter libel (or “Twibel”) has only emerged over the past several years, but so far has only resulted in settlements. US singer Courtney Love became one of the first to be sued for her tweets in a case that was finally resolved in 2011 after two years. Love eventually paid £264,000 to fashion designer Dawn Simorangkir after attacking her on Twitter. The agreed amount came from consideration of Love’s influence as an entertainer and the massive dissemination potential of Twitter. Soon after, a Welsh town councillor settled the first British Twitter libel case by paying £3,000 to a rival candidate.

As long as these cases are settled rather than battled out in court, Twitter will continue to define its own boundaries. Although the former minister’s legal team has diligently tracked down malicious tweets, most of the 10,000 tweeters on the list will not be charged with individual lawsuits, and will instead likely be given the option to make nominal donations of at least £5 to the BBC’s Children in Need charity. These casual tweeters are those most in need of a wake-up call, as the next major defamation victim may not extend such lenience.

People’s readiness to retweet a rumour indicates that they need to spend more time thinking not only about what they tweet, but also about the tweets they read. Although much of Twitter’s appeal is its informality, it enables users to make painfully public mistakes with a wide reach and considerable consequences. Twitter’s offices have been silent on the libel suits, and there is no indication that Twitter will introduce any new mechanisms to encourage fact-checking or to discourage potentially libellous tweets. Until Twitter takes steps to mediate its content, it falls to tweeters to regulate themselves and the courts to punish pernicious posters.

Blagged by a blog, hacks should pull up their socks

The popular American online newspaper Huffington Post launched its UK edition last week and with the site reading like a who’s who of the political, social and entertainment elite, one would assume that blogging is as good a form of journalism as any. Co-founder Arianna Huffington knows that much of her brand’s success is engagement with the audience and “the incredible impact social media can have in accelerating change”. Ordinary citizens have slowly become instrumental in the modern news making process and their shouts are finally being heard, but as social media and the blogosphere expand it’s difficult to see whether it’s a step forward for democracy or just more online noise pollution.

Today social networking, championed by the masses, is a force to be reckoned with. Facebook has more than 750 million users and every day the world writes an equivalent of a 10 million page book in Tweets. The internet’s power to impact on the news has been evident in the News of the World phone hacking scandal of late, where the online campaign to boycott the newspaper influenced the Murdoch Empire’s decision to discontinue the 168 year old publication. News of the scandal spread like wildfire and became, in a matter of days, the whole nation’s chosen topic of conversation-- starting on their laptops and ending over a pint in the pub. It seems the internet has developed into quite the formidable forum for debate, comment and opinion.

A great example of the proliferation of citizen journalism is the blog ‘A gay girl in Damascus’ which attracted coverage from the most prestigious of news corporations, the BBC, The Guardian and CNN to name a few. These publications’ respected journalists; moved by the plight of Amina Abdallah Araf al Omari- a young lesbian woman living in politically unstable Muslim Syria, hung on the blogger’s every word and recounted her tales of trials and tragedy to their sizeable readerships. Sharing her personal struggle with her sexuality set against the backdrop of a war-torn and fiercely religious country, Amina’s experiences appeared to cast a spotlight on serious political issues surrounding the repressive Syrian regime.

The power of the blog came into full force when her ‘cousin’ alerted followers that Amina had been abducted by security forces, triggering online campaigns and causing the US embassy to launch an investigation on her whereabouts. Little did they know Amina was in fact the alter-ego of Tom MacMaster-- a 40 year old American with a life-size imagination, living out his bizarre fantasy from the comfort of his bedroom in the pretty Scottish city of Edinburgh. Quite a coup for the Masters student, who transformed his image from an unsightly unknown to an attractive, compelling wordsmith; racking up almost 100,000 page views and counting some of the world’s most established journos among his admirers. Eventually MacMaster confirmed growing suspicions that his blog was fictional, but the plot continued to thicken when it emerged ‘Amina’ was pursuing an online relationship with ‘Paula Brooks’, the editor of pro-homosexuality site ‘Lez Get Real’- another site posing under a false premise. Both transpired to be middle aged male bloggers, no doubt getting a kick out of successfully seducing a lesbian, completely oblivious to each others true gender – the irony is far from lost.

‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ sparked outrage in the blogosphere with many Syrians claiming MacMaster has taken away their voice in true ‘boy who cried wolf’ style, potentially damaging the opportunity for Middle Eastern citizens to have their say. It’s worth remembering, however, that reputable news companies handed ‘Amina’ the megaphone in the first place. What began as a personal project ended up a worldwide phenomenon – all because professional journalists fell for the story hook line and sinker. An industry that prides itself on holding others to account and exposing wrongdoing forgot the golden rule of journalism, check, double check and bloody well check the facts again- and were too busy pulling on the nation’s heartstrings to investigate the credibility of their sources.

There’s no doubt that the Internet has finally put the citizen on the news map, albeit armed with the handy shield of the computer screen. There’s a lot of stuff on the web that is fake, misleading and incorrect. Unfortunately, it’s a fact of life that comes with the territory of being the biggest advance in communication in our time. The age old warning of online predators is more relevant today than ever and professional journalists would do well to remember that you can’t always trust people you meet on the net.

Traditional news media have been given an opportunity to play God with the swathes of information now available and must hand pick the wheat from the chaff – instead lazy journalism has left them scraping the barrel. Many attempts at citizen journalism do become valid sources of information, but MacMaster isn’t the first and certainly won’t be the last of the online con artists. With so many different voices vying for attention, internet noise pollution is rife but manageable. The noise only becomes problematic when journalists neglect the basic principles of their profession and allow unchecked information to disguise itself as news. After all, ‘Amina’ was only telling a tale, not writing the front pages of a bestselling newspaper.