Retweeting - When it Involves "Facts," Be Sure the Source is Right!

By I.J. Hudson

I gave a young reporter an idea for a blog post the other day.  And he wrote it.  However, I think I’d better write it myself.  It’s about “telephone.” (Remember when we had just telephones?)

You may remember this game from childhood.  Someone starts it by whispering something to the person next to them; that person whispers the information to the next person, etc.  Everyone then laughs as the last person in the line repeats the information after it has been “filtered” through all the people playing in the game – their “nuances” added.  The original story changed according to what the previous people thought they heard.  The facts OUT did not always match the facts IN.   

The new telephone game is called, retweeting – it’s the same game, but the problem is that retweeting copies the information IN perfectly.  (Note:  I did not say “facts”)

So what’s the point, I.J.?  It’s really pretty simply.  There is no denying Twitter and retweeting can spread a great idea and cause change.  But “copy and paste” social media can be very thin, inaccurate and be spread robotically by well-meaning folks. 

It’s one thing to retweet an idea; it’s an entirely different story when you retweet blindly..  Just because someone you follow says something -- doesn’t make it true.  Case in point:

I've been following the recent flooding along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers with great interest.  I grew up near the confluence of those two rivers,  have family back there, know how to pronounce the names of the local towns in “Little Egypt.”  I followed the flooding, river stages, Army Corps of Engineers releases – everything I could find.  And when the Corps decided to blow up a levee on the Southeast Missouri side, I was dumbfounded to see on twitter (by one account) that they had blown up a levee on the Cairo, IL side. Then dozens of people simply retweeted that one account containing inaccurate information.  They didn’t do any fact-checking, just whispered in the ear of the next guy exactly what the first guy had gotten wrong.  Mistakes went viral.

It’s really no different from what happened during my latter TV days.  A copy mistake in an early morning newscast could be “copied and pasted” to subsequent newscasts - the error repeated all day long – until/unless someone looked at the content closely and said, “wait, we need to correct this.”

The same thing happened this week when a variety of news media in Baltimore and Washington re-tweeted/copied ONE story from AP about MARC trains running late because a sewage pipe had broken somewhere between Rockville and Garrett Park.  All of the news media parroted the AP story.  Every  link provided by the various tweeters went to the AP story.  The story itself was vague and begged for answers.  And it had errors.  There was no break, although there was odor near Twinbrook Metro caused by a missing manhole.  To his/her credit, at least one reporter actually made phone calls and asked questions.  Obviously, others just repeated what they had seen on twitter or in other publications who had just copied what they saw somewhere else.

Call it "misinformation cloning." (Please give me credit for inventing that phrase :}).  It's almost a river of misinformation because the errors appear in the twitter streams of everyone who retweets the bad information....and it spreads, and spreads.

Please.  If you’re interested in reporting facts, in accuracy, don’t copy and paste.   Be a reporter. Get sources.  And if you’re part of a group that shares information among different neighborhood websites, be darn sure you’ve got it right before sharing it with the other folks.  The truth multiplied can be very powerful; unchecked facts multiplied can be harmful.