Journalists should beware of all-too-frequent hoaxes and fake news circulating on Twitter, say the always-aggregating folks at BreakingNews.com.
Cory Bergman writes that the BreakingNews team finds “an increasing amount of fake Twitter photos and YouTube clips these days. I’m not talking about The Daily Show and The Onion, but semi-sophisticated efforts to dupe people during breaking stories.”
Journalists are especially vulnerable during big, developing news situations when they are urgently seeking the latest scoop by hunting or crowdsourcing on social networks — like Tuesday’s earthquake.
Howard Kurtz wrote after the quake that “much of the media has only one volume these days, and that is loud.” He was talking about the media’s tendency to fixate and sensationalize, not its accuracy. But that urge to sensationalize can drive journalists to find something sensational. And that’s where they become susceptible to hoaxes. “Too good to be true” becomes “too good not to publish.”
The BreakingNews team saw many people sharing a video of buildings swaying in New York City, but recognized it as footage from the Tokyo earthquake in March.
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- Police block off the alley behind the Embassy of Ecquador in Washington after part of the building sustained damages, Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2011, after a earthquake in the Washington area. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
A photo circulated (again) showing “earthquake damage” that was just a lawn chair tipped over in someone’s back yard. That was a joke to begin with, but it’s also an old photo that’s been sent around before, Bergman notes. I also remember seeing it tweeted after a small 2010 earthquake near Rockville, Md.
Elsewhere, I found a recent college graduate posing on Google+ as Paul Krugman, for the purpose of damaging the reputation of the New York Times columnist with whom he disagrees ideologically. After the earthquake he posted in Krugman’s name: ”People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.” Several journalists and bloggers took the bait.
Concerns about the spread of inaccurate information are as old as the Internet itself. But Bergman writes that in his experience they are “appearing faster than ever before — sometimes minutes after a story breaks.”
I’ve previously written a guide to verifying and publishing news from social media, which I encourage journalists to read and discuss with their newsrooms. It’s best to make a plan in advance, so you don’t have to make one up or make bad decisions when the adrenaline is flowing.
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