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.

LinkedIn Users Loving Twitter Breakup

More than three out of five LinkedIn users (61 per cent) say their experience of the business networking service is now “better” or “much better” since their connections’ Twitter updates were removed from their live stream. The poll, carried out by Parker Wayne & Kent Public Relations, also shows that younger LinkedIn users were more likely to be in favour of the change. 

In June 2012, Twitter announced that tweets would no longer sync with LinkedIn streams, severing the two and a half year partnership between the companies. Ryan Roslansky, Head of Content Products at LinkedIn, said the split stemmed from Twitter’s “evolving platform efforts”, suggesting a push in efforts by the micro-blog giant to channel consumers back to its own site.

According to Michael Sippey, Product Team Director at Twitter, some of Twitter’s new features, such as expandable tweets, were not visible on LinkedIn. He noted in a company blog post that “[users] need to be able to see expanded Tweets and other features that make Twitter more engaging and easier to use. These are the features that make Twitter Twitter.”

Whilst many may have expected this backtracking move to be met with objection by social media users, poll responses suggest otherwise. Of the 300 voters who participated in the poll on LinkedIn, just 11 per cent of voters feel that it has become “worse” or “much worse” while 28 per cent maintain that their experience of the site remains unchanged by the split.

Many assume that younger people are the most hungry for social media updates from every platform, yet the results of the poll prove that those in a younger age bracket appreciate the split most. Of the voters whose birthday is logged with LinkedIn, users in the 18-36 year old bracket showed a significant tendency to say that their experience has been improved.

When the partnership between the two social media sites began in 2009, the syncing of streams was set to boost the number of younger users on LinkedIn. In return, Twitter was to gain increased exposure to LinkedIn’s fast-expanding user base. The sync appealed to users as it allowed CEOs and employees on LinkedIn networks to provide real-time updates to their connections.

However, the poll revealed that the general sentiment once tweet updates were removed was one of relief. Participants said that having LinkedIn activity streams filled with tweets became a nuisance. Where many Twitter users may update every hour or so, LinkedIn users might only update their statuses once a week. The result was that carefully put together LinkedIn updates were swamped by a mass of tweets. One user commented, “The tweets on LinkedIn were akin to spam mail, rarely having anything to do with professional networking”. Another user commented “it is too bad that this feature was abused by so many”, whilst one referred to the tweets on LinkedIn as “pointless rambling”.

Senior Public Relations professional at Parker, Wayne & Kent, Richard Bell, said “If social media sites are going to collaborate successfully, there needs to be a way to filter what is relevant for the different sites and for the different users. Syncing updates across all social networks makes the content untargeted to each networks’ communities and users’ various groups of connections. The time-poor business community wants focused content with a personality on LinkedIn; Facebook users want deeper personal information from people they’ve met; Twitter users want information, recommendations and short comment from strangers as well as friends.”

It is still possible for LinkedIn updates to broadcast to Twitter. When posting a status on LinkedIn, clicking the ‘Share on Twitter’ button beneath the text box will permit the status to appear on Twitter feeds.
The results of the poll here.