Comments on: Hurricane Sandy and Twitter as a self-cleaning oven for news

By: oven cleaning

oven cleaning — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:23:42 +0000

Social media really affects the information that the mind of the follower. It is the best source in reaching out the focus of people. That’s why every information should be factual and mostly before the viewers have that information in hand make sure that the source is reliable.

By: Bertil Hatt

Bertil Hatt — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 12:38:48 +0000

It seems fairly easy to set up a census to ask if the respondent has seen some of the photos (the dark cloud over the Statue of Liberty, and the carrousel, e.g.) and whether they know if they are real, dated, or shopped, or even if the photographer was a professional. Then, comparing answers from people who regularly watch TV vs. those who regularly follow twitter, you’d have a valid estimation of how much twitter heals itself.
I’d recommend A/B testing the photos and the question, to limit it to:
* two “Have you seen this photo before?—Is it real/taken by a pro…?”
* “Do you follow regularly: [ ] Newspapers [ ] Radio [ ] TV [ ] twitter [ ] Facebook [ ] Other social media”
to keep it a short survey. With a reasonable audience of 10k, you’d have significant results.

Not sure how to reach TV viewers, or how to encourage a vaguely representative sample (probably Mechanical Turkers to have an international audience) but —apart from having no audience— anyone could set that up easily.

By: Karoli

Karoli — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 20:08:19 +0000

Twitter is at its best in an emergency. Unfortunately it is also the river that carries much everyday misinformation that appeals to people’s baser instincts, for example. Mark Kelley’s debate example is a good one. Yes, there was rich commentary, but there was a tremendous amount of noise and disinformation being planted there.

So let’s ask ourselves whether it was a good idea for CNN to be trolling forums and Twitter for news to report, or whether having bodies monitoring scanners would have been a better use of their resources. I listened to the FDNY radio scanner(s) last night when I finally tired of watching Ali Velshi standing in pools of standing water when dry sidewalk was right behind him.

As a long-standing Twitter fan, I’m tiring of the constant need to “self-clean” the garbage that flows through there. We need actual journalists in the field, on the scanners, and on the screen instead of people monitoring and filtering Internet disinformation.

By: Mark Kelley

Mark Kelley — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 16:28:16 +0000

Anybody that watched the debates with twitter on hand had a much richer experience (depending on who they were following) that added a lot of what could be called “crowd sourced color commentary”. Twitter, like Wikipedia (another self-cleaning over) can quickly bring true subject matter experts, it not simply eye witnesses – to any newsworthy story quickly.