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This Just In…
Fake handles, real problems for Twitter’s credibility
February 25, 2009
The ease of creating a Twitter account, and the lack of verification necessary, makes it easy for imposters to tweet under a false identity, writes Simon Owens for MediaShift.com. A faux Dalai Lama account, for instance, accumulated nearly 2,000 followers in the two days before the Tibetan leader’s staff became aware of the account and contacted the Twitter site.
Some celebrities, such as basketball player Shaquille O’Neal (@THE_REAL_SHAQ), have created their own accounts to dispel impersonators. However, after several accounts were recently hacked, audiences were reminded that even legitimate sources online can’t always be trusted to produce authentic information.
“The problem for Twitter,” writes Owens, “is that if enough fakesters cause havoc, people will lose trust in the system, something that’s hard to win back online.”
Lidija Darvis, a regular contributor for ReadWriteWeb, was one of the journalists who had to issue a correction for the Dalai Lama story. The pressure to get news out as quickly as possible, at any time of night, makes it difficult to obtain verification from a press representative when working on deadline. Darvis comments that social media platforms will eventually have to directly address this issue.
“It’s a huge problem,” says Darvis. “It’s a stage where everyone is still learning, Twitter is still learning, I’m still learning to deal with this kind of story.”
Comments
Jennifer Huergo says:
Isn't it the journalist's job to verify facts before running a story? Saying that "pressure to get news out quickly" makes their jobs difficult is a lame excuse. Difficult is not impossible. If they had done due diligence, those reporters could have reported on how people were fooled by the false Twitter account, and avoided writing a correction. And it would have been a nice reminder that there is a difference between the professional journalist and the blogger or citizen reporter. As useful as the latter are, we still need the pros.
Dan Hope says:
This has been the problem with social media sites all along. No verification, no veracity (all those "v" words...). Who can you believe? And as stated so obviously in your article, the pressure to get the story out first means many journalists don't verify - blindly trusting what they read online and running with it. Media outlets encourage this as they seek new revenues from advertising based on their "reputation" which is often related to how quickly they get sensational stories out there. Good journalists have always verified the facts of their stories before publishing, but now that journalistic integrity has been compromised by the lack of integrity online. If I want unverifiable gossip, I'll go to social media sites - which I don't do.
Bonnie Sashin says:
The risks of online "identity theft" posed by Twitter are similar to those posed by Facebook where anybody can set up an account using anybody's name. Of course from the vantage point of the journalist, fact-checking is the rule.
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