Online Journalism Blog
Paul Bradshaw noticed that commenters quickly debunked a Reuters post last week speculating that News of the World’s closure could enable the company to destroy imporant records, but that didn’t stop about 4,000 people from retweeting the link. (I tweeted the story from @Poynter, too.) So Bradshaw set up a Twitter account called @autodebunker that would automatically respond to everyone who retweeted the Reuters post.
His solution, which he details on his blog: He searched for all tweets that referenced the Reuters post, created an RSS feed of the results, and used Feedburner and Twitterfeed to automatically respond to people. “It’s an illustration of how you can use computer power to communicate with a distributed population of distributors,” Bradshaw writes. And after all this, he asks, why hasn’t Reuters updated the post or acknowledged the criticisms? || Earlier: After incorrect reports of Gabrielle Giffords’ death, Poynter.org led a discussion on how a Twitter correction tool could work.
