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It was wonderfully heartening to read Connie Reece's post on Twitter and the horror in Mumbai from Tuesday. She was a Twitterer who did her research to, as she put it, "sift the wheat from the chaff" when it came to sorting through all the news coming out around the terrorist attacks on one of India's financial hubs. As Jeremiah Owyang points out in his excellent post on the subject, social tools like Twitter can easily spread information faster than ever imagined. This is great if the information is correct, but what if it's not:
A hundred years ago, we would never imagine how information could spread so quickly. These tools are powerful, they allow anyone to share –and hear– information transmitted from others in real time from anywhere. We learned that both true and false information was being spread from these tools, in fact for days after this Mubai event rumors were still being settled. In fact, one of the concerns in this Mumai attack is that rumors were quickly spreading, and there was no central source to verify. In some cases, conversations in Twitter (and even the retweet) can influence press, and therefore spread information to other locations impacting how emergency services could react.
In fact, he points out, terrorists are definitely using social tools to monitor the response to their activities: We learned that the Mumbai terrorists were using Blackberry’s to communicate and monitor. This 10 man crack commando team was able to cause extensive havoc for 3 days. They were trained, funded, and had intelligence. Just as we should expect they are monitoring the police airways and public tv stations, we learned they were monitoring online the “police responses on the internet”. It’s so very easy to do, as people were tagging content #mumbai and it’s easily searchable by Twitter.
This worried Indian officials so much that they asked folks to stop tweeting about the incident, according to reports from the BBC, prompting skepticism from Twitterers around the world. Connie Reece points out that the spread of misinformation isn't always accidental: After a few hours the #mumbai hashtag was infected with a number of people taking advantage of the opportunity to spread their propaganda. Suddenly we were hearing that the Mumbai terror attacks had been perpetrated by the Mossad (the Jewish conspiracy theory that routinely gets trotted out); that all Muslims are terrorists (ditto); or that the attacks were the handiwork of Hindus, etc., etc. Some tweeters were more subtle but still had an obvious agenda.
It was interesting to see how many of these trolls had created Twitter accounts strictly for that purpose. Click through to the profile and you could see that they were following zero people and had zero followers, or a handful at most, and that the oldest updates had begun after the terror attacks took place.
So what's a responsible blogger or Twitterer to do? - Do your homework before posting news or commentary.
- If you want to be respected like a journalist, ask questions of primary sources like journalists do.
- Don't just automatically "re-tweet" or re-post information without checking up on it.
- Use the right keywords or hashtags in your post to help with searchability.
- Actively correct misinformation.
So, was all of this activity surrounding the Mumbai attacks journalism? I think Mitch Joel put it best just last month: A Citizen Journalist is no more of a Journalist than someone who gives you good personal advice is a Citizen Psychiatrist. It might well be time to ditch the idea of Citizen Journalism and call it what is: a witness with a recorder.
Does that mean that there's no place for journalism in the social media world? Of course not. People crave authenticity, and want to believe that what they're reading is true. We're just not always equipped, or motivated, to verify. Take the case of Virginia Heffernan, who wrote in the New York Times about her opportunity to report on some local news: What frustrated me here is that few journalists — citizen or pro — seemed to have done much, if any, reporting, even though there was a surfeit of interest. Everyone seemed to cite someone else, and no one with much conviction. Maybe I should have walked over to the scene, after all, and talked to the police myself. The challenge is that social media lends itself more to commentary and analysis, rather than true reporting. Traditionally, reporting is done in a very formal structure with no first- or second-person references and with as little personal opinion and commentary as possible---this of course goes against the grain of blogging, which is all about the 'I' and the 'think'. But as the scope of social tools broadens, we will find the right way to better integrate journalists into social media, and social media into journalism. The concept of citizen journalism was blemished with the false reports of Steve Jobs' death, but redeemed more recently with coverage of Mumbai (despite the occasional misinformation meme/campaign). Reporters, meanwhile, are taking heed of what can be learned from this coverage. As trust mechanisms become more prevalent and easy to use, the ugly side of social media and citizen journalism will become harder to see. Like spam, it will probably never go away---misinformation will continue to very much have a place on the Internet---but with the help of our real journalist friends, we may get better at finding and sharing the right stuff.
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