Editors Note: Today was a horrible day in Tucson, Arizona, and as far as the shooting itself, the criminal investigation and any political ramifications, we are not here to discuss any of that, and ourcondolencesand thoughts go out to all those killed, injured and to their families. We are here to discuss Twitter and breaking news.
Twitter needs an anchor or perhaps hundreds, thousands or millions of them.
A while back specifically when the world was transfixed by Tiger Woods crash on his lawn, an event that in really no way compares to todays events MG Siegler over on Techcrunch wrote a seminal piece saying that Twitter was the new Walter Cronkite, i.e. it has become the place that we all turn to get the most breaking of news. I thought a lot about that post during todays events, and I now feel that while the point that Twitter is the place to go for breaking news is beyond question, I think that saying that Twitter is the new Cronkite is going a bit too far I think that Twitter actually needs its own Cronkite, either standing alone or preferably with the aid of crowdsourced volunteers.
If you were not following the days events in real-time on Twitter today, then Ill give a quick recap of the roughly two hours on Twitter preceding the press conference at hospital where the victims were sent:
The conflicting reports upset many people, blaming Twitter/reporters/people sharing the news that they messed up. That, to me, wasnt the case news organizations were doing their best to get the story as straight as quickly as possible, and many on Twitter were also doing their best to constantly pass on the correct and most up-to-date information. In fact, if anything, it reminded me that news of John F. Kennedysassassinationwas handled in quite a similar fashion by Cronkite trying to sort through all of the conflicting reports as an anxious world watched in the real-time of the day.
It was a kind of crowdsourced editorial effort that has happened in some ways before on Twitter, but today seemed to me to be the starkest example of this Ive ever seen and that includes personally doing the same through multiple natural disasters including the Haiti earthquake nearly a year ago to the day.
If you were helping to find and pass on the most accurate information of the moment, you were part of one giant newsroom today.
However, there was one issue that keep coming up to me today, and it had to do specifically with some of the changes that Twitter has made over the last year, specifically the Top Tweet distinction on search. If you dont know what a Top Tweet does, basically, it is sticky at the top of the search results because it has had so many retweets. In most cases, this is perfectly fine. However, for a long while today, there was a Top Tweet by a CNN Political Director Sam Fiest (since deleted, I just found out, almost certainly by himself) that had both sides of the story, saying Giffords was taken the hospital and that asheriffhad said she was already dead. That tweet was stuck up near the top of Twitter search for awhile, even after it was b! ecoming very clear that Giffords was in fact alive.
While its impossible to tell if there was any kind of negative effect from the spreading of what turned out to be false info (though I of course Fiest was hardly the only one tweeting it out and I dont blame Fiest if that is what he was informed) that tweet had while millions of others were flying around Twitter, it opened up to me a need that I hope Twitter address adding some crisis situation editorial.
Twitter has stated quite clearly that it embraces its roll as the place that breaking news and indeed entire movements can take place on its service, but with that commitment has to come some kind of responsibility. There is a large difference between someone (or a news organization) tweeting out something that turns out to be untrue, to continuing to highlight that misinformation simply based on the number of times it has been retweeted (just to be clear, Im not suggesting that Twitter just delete tweets that would be censorship just removing the Top Tweet distinction, which can give a lot of weight to a tweet, regardless of its factual accuracy).
Noalgorithm can fix this only human beings can. As crowdsourcing projects such as CrisisCommons have shown (disclosure: Im an active volunteer with CrisisCommons), human gardening is very important to getting the story straight. In the worst-case, unattended misinformation could lead to obstructing official responses to crisis, including getting the most up-to-date and official news to everyone.
During todays crisis, NPRs Andy Carvin put up a Storify about the event, which was much appreciated, but Storify can only be used to collect, not to actually affect the news editorially on Twitter. So heres what Im suggesting for Twitter to at least consider: either hire an experienced editorial staff that can quickly make changes to direct people to the most! factual /official account of what is happening during a crisis, and/or develop amechanismwhere Twitter users can vote up or down tweets (or perhaps flag in a way?). Of course, a retweet itself is a kind of vote up, but there is no way to vote anything down
Yes, that sounds a lot like Quora, doesnt it? Somewhat surprisingly to me, Quora wasnt used this way today (I set up an experiment after the news had settled a bit even so). If Twitter doesnt do this, I can see citizen (and actual) reporters using Quora or a similar service in the future to get the story straight and spread the correct word. That said, Twitter has proven itself as the platform for this new generation of news, but were still waiting for old Walter to take his seat.
