Your reasoning is fallacious on many other fronts.

You believe that, because some individuals use Twitter to send reports of unfolding events, and that because this has happened in multiple cases, Twitter must be a news network. But you are mistaking the *use* of a microblogging platform for the *effect* of some of the messages transmitted on it.

News can be spread in real time via e-mail, but that doesn’t make Google or other Webmail services into news networks. Cell fones can spread news in real time, but no one claims that Verizon is a news network. Merely transmitting accounts that may, or may not, be factual does not make Twitter, or any particular medium, a news network–and it does not, necessarily, make those who tweet into reporters or citizen-journalists.

Simply because *some people* use Twitter to spread their version of events does not mean that Twitter *itself* is a news network. Certainly some tweets may contain news, but the errors you cite (and many, many more exist) are proof that no one can ever be sure that any tweet is factual. (Or even comes from the actual person it claims to be from: “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”)

More to the point, you’re asking the wrong question: *Twitter* cannot possibly get anything “wrong”–the errors belong to only certain tweeters and their unreliable messages, not Twitter itself.

News transmitted by unknown and unverifiable sources is often highly unreliable. I’m sure many governments are, and have been, tweeting disinformation ever since the Iranian protests in 2009, and doubtless many propagandists, campaign managers, politicians and PR practitioners do as well every day.

The problem with living in a world where everyone can be a publisher is that we have no means of judging the credibility or accuracy of the source. If everyone is special, then no one is special, and real reporting can get drowned in the cacophony.

Why should anyone believe an unknown source’s subjective interpretation of what may (or may not) be happening is truly happening in the way the stranger claims it to be? Those of us who have been first responders know that you’re likely to get as many different versions of a traumatic event as you have witnesses to relate them.

Twitter doesn’t need a correction process, or any other procedure, to protect the veracity of events described with Twitter, because no system can possibly do so. Gullible people simply need to consider the source, and assume, until proven otherwise by a credible source, that what they read on Twitter is unreliable, unverified, untrue or deliberately transmitted to achieve certain effects.

Overall Twitter and other social media venues are areas for people to express there thoughts, share news, and post what is on their mind. EVEN IF IT IS WRONG!

The great part about it is others can correct and if people take Tweets as a whole and note just one Tweet, while using other forms of RELIABLE information they will be able to get the REAL STORY.

I would be very interested to see Twitter to role out an annotation system. This would be a very good addition to the experience on Twitter.

My apologies and I do have to stand corrected. My understanding from your site and what you blogged about was that you had journalistic training. Please do accept my apologies. I am also using Mathew’s blog to make the correction. I hope this is the right outlet.

@ Mathew

Obviously, journalists are human (heck, I’m an academic and I’m human too). I just think the retweeting is always a bit too knee-jerk.

@ Andrew – as an academic I have to agree – be right should be first.

What if you have to choose one? I hope that the AP would choose right. There are many on social media, including Twitter, who would choose first.

I would like to correct some “facts” you’ve just written about me here. First, I’m not a journalist (I blog and write op-eds, I rarely report). Second, I’m not trained in journalism.

I agree with you, of course, but I don’t think you should hold me to a higher standard.

-Jillian

Well, what happens when a friend tells you something that is incorrect?

Life moves on, that’s what!

You know how they say :”There are no stupid questions?”

This was a stupid premise for a “news” story AND a stupid question!

In our case the “multiple sources” included: you, Gawker, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, The Financial Times, Huffington Post and about a million monkeys hitting the retweet button. Did all of these mainstream and prominent internet websites source it via “multiple sources” ? Impossible, since it was completely wrong info to begin with.

In the Giffords case I recall getting a CNN breaking news alert on the death of the Congresswomen which cited “a source has told CNN”, followed by a sheepish follow-up alert along the lines of, no, not dead but “some reports earlier said she was dead”. So Is “a source” who told CNN she was dead “multiple sources”?

What did they mean by “some earlier reports” were wrong? They meant the 10 or 20 million email alerts sent out from CNN are “some reports”?

The funny thing about the Wikileaks episode is people started spreading bad info who had no idea, no concept or any conception of what exactly a nameserver is, what happens if you cut off somebody’s DNS or how to check who does DNS for a domain (whois lookup anybody?) who were all too anxious to retweet what they “knew”.

So here’s a tip: if you don’t know enough about a given piece of info to verify it or understand it on your own, you have NO business retweeting it.