Fact-check Twitter You Twit!, Tyler Grant

The jury's still out if Twitter sucks or not. Many people extol the virtues of it in the news world, while others lambaste it. What it comes down to is fact checking. Twitter can be useful if you're an Iranian dissident trying to get word out of political unrest on the streets of Tehran, but it can be horrible to find out you're dead because someone made a Tweet about it- poor Gordon Lightfoot.

What it comes down to is fact-checking. If you don't check your facts, you won't be credible. If you're not credible, people won't listen to you. Pretty simple.

A really good example of this is Nate Clarke's blog post at Fourth Line Films. Mr. Clarke describes a scenario of a photographer named Jeremy Cowart who was in Haiti after the recent earthquake. Mr. Cowart has 12,000 followers on Twitter. Many of these followers read this post: "I’ve been in #Haiti for 5 days and haven’t seen a SINGLE Red Cross person or vehicle. Even at the airport. Where is all that $$ going???".

Can you see where this is going?

Well, the Red Cross was actually there, and 12 hours later, Mr. Cowart tweeted this: "My apologies to the Red Cross. It was just an observation. Just cause (sic) I don't see them doesn't mean they're not here and effective."

When Matt White, a journalism student from MacEwan University, talked about fact-checking in his PROW 135: Copyediting and Proofreading blog, he couldn't have said it better: "To close, saying that accuracy is important in journalism is an under statement. It is the essence of journalism. Without accuracy, an article or piece is useless to its readers. All facts, dates, names, etc. must be 100 per cent accurate... otherwise, you're just another unqualified reporter pretending to be a journalist."

To me, if you're retweeting someone's words without checking the validity of his or her statement first, you're nothing more than a gossip columnist.

Photo courtesy of:colinjamesfirth