Social media: When tweets lie

The news was almost unthinkable, said The Christian Science Monitor in an editorial. The New York Stock Exchange, the world’s financial hub, had apparently succumbed to last week’s super-storm. “The trading floor is flooded under more than 3ft of water,” Twitter user “comfortablysmug” informed his 6,000 followers. The only problem? “It wasn’t true.” “Comfortablysmug” was exposed as a serial liar—but not before the lie that the stock market was inundated had been re-tweeted over 650 times, and reported on CNN and in The Washington Post. That wasn’t the only social-media fabrication as Sandy hit, said Cord Jefferson in Gawker.com. Rumors flew about a burning hospital in Coney Island, and doctored photos circulated of divers in a flooded subway tunnel, and of the Statue of Liberty being submerged by waves. What if firemen or police had risked their lives on the basis of Twitter’s “hive of lies”?

In our new social-media ecosystem, said Alexis Madrigal in TheAtlantic.com, disinformation of this kind is inevitable. When a professional journalist gets a story wrong, or simply makes things up, his or her career can be destroyed. On Twitter and Facebook, everyone’s a publisher, and it’s both easy and rewarding to start rumors, pass on lies, or post jaw-dropping fake photos. You get lots of attention that way. Who cares if it’s not true—especially if you’re posting anonymously? Twitter’s “savage self-correction” sets the record straight soon enough, said John Herrman in BuzzFeed.com. Soon after the stock-exchange tweet went viral, the NYSE itself tweeted a picture of its untouched trading floor, and “comfortablysmug” was unmasked as Republican political consultant Shashank Tripathi—who had to resign from his job as a result. Yes, Twitter spreads rumors, but it is also a “fact-processing machine on a grand scale.”

Social media can do more than debunk rumors, said David Carr in The New York Times. After I lost power during Sandy, the “little campfire of Twitter posts on my smartphone” kept me company, allowing me to keep close track of the storm, and of my friends in several states, in real time. Twitter became a font of “relentlessly and remarkably local” information about power outages and flooding in our towns, boroughs, and neighborhoods. Twitter has its flaws, but “there is no more important news than that.”

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