Is Social Media Content Reliable?
Social media allows anyone to write, edit, and publish content without gatekeepers. People can create a username on social media sites like Wikipedia, Wordpress, or Twitter and deliver content directly to millions of people. This is great for aspiring writers and academics who want to share their thoughts and ideas with others without being forced to have someone else review, edit, and censor their work.
Every positive must have a negative; it’s a law of nature. The accessibility of social media is its best strength and its worst weakness. Without having someone else review their content, people can easily create lies and fake authority to intentionally mislead others. Wikipedia is not a creditable source for academic writing due to the lack of a gatekeeper; however, the reference links at the bottom of an entry can be creditable so it is still a great starting point for academic research.
There are several well-known cases of Wikipedia abuse, one in particular about a prominent journalist named John Seigenthaler, who had a false biography added to his Wikipedia page in May 2005 that read, “John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960s. For a short time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.” Seigenthaler had the entry removed from Wikipedia and tried to find who posted the false information. He tried tracing an IP address, but BellSouth’s investigation lead nowhere. Eventually the case was solved but Seigenthaler declined to press charges as he was concerned about this case leading to more regulation of the Internet.
In 2006 members of Congress were caught abusing Wikipedia to insult one another, alter their own entries to put themselves in a more positive light, and even create events that never occurred. It was not difficult to trace the IP address of the edits back to an address restricted to Congress. “One edit listed White House press secretary Scott McClellan under the entry for ‘douche.’ Another said of Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Oklahoma) that: ‘Coburn was voted the most annoying Senator by his peers in Congress. This was due to Senator Coburn being a huge douche-bag.’”
One Irish student, Shane Fitzgerald, wrote a fake quote on a recently deceased French composer named Maurice Jarre, who died in March. It was a great quote, which was probably why it populated throughout the world in his obituaries. The quote was written as an experiment in globalization, but the experiment’s results surprised even Fitzgerald. He had no idea mainstream news media would publish the quote from Wikipedia. Even after the truth was exposed, numerous news sources kept the quote.
Twitter has also been subjected to abuse. Last week there were four celebrity deaths all heavily tweeted: Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Billy Mays. Some people decided they would try to see how far their joke would go if they tweeted that Jeff Goldblum fell off a cliff or that George Clooney was in a plane crash. Eventually some did some fact checking and the rumors were suppressed, but Twitter’s nature of retweeting reinforced the spread of false information.
Newsmediachatter.com posted a blog entry on the false information being spread about the swine flu. If you search #swineflu, you’d find the flu everywhere with more deaths accounted for than reported by the traditional media. Someone trying to get their 5 minutes of fame or is there something mainstream media isn’t telling us that we can only find out through Twitter? With the Iran election, the world sees a different view of Tehran than what the state media provides. A partial recount done by the government cites the election results are valid. Of course it would be, ballot stuffing or the lack of an investigation would yield the same results.
Does social media enable spreading false information or is it merely another medium for gossip to spread? And just because there is a gatekeeper doesn’t mean all false information is stopped (A Million Little Pieces from Oprah’s book club, for example). Should people not use Wikipedia because of the potential falsified statements? Or really do we need to remind people to never trust what you hear and see without checking it yourself?
People don’t always tell the truth, no matter what medium they use. Don’t blame the medium for what is only human nature.
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Twitter like any other form of communication needs a person brain to review all the informaton and think about the bigger picture. We want instant information, instant thoughts, nana-second data updates but what is the real story. Or our brains will turn to goo. So many of us are addicted to our crackberries.