Michael Jackson is dead…and Farrah Fawcett…and Billy Mays..and Natalie Portman…and Jeff Goldblum…and Britney Spears…and Harrison Ford…?
Who is really dead? And how am I supposed to know the truth?
Twitter’s ability to instantaneously disseminate news (whether true or false), has sent mainstream news sites scrambling to keep up. Twitter users posted about Michael Jackson’s death hours before any major news site did, albeit based off a TMZ report. Why? Well, no one needs to verify Twitter news. And in a failed attempt to keep up, major news sources started incorrectly posting other celebrity deaths. Oops.
While it’s nice to have up-to-the-second updates via Twitter, I have to believe there is still a place for traditional, verifiable news. But is Twitter really to blame? No, we are. Here are three (and a half) ways to verify your Twitter news:
1) Are other people tweeting about it? This is a preliminary step. There were millions of people tweeting about Jeff Goldblum’s “death” (including Jeff Goldblum), but much like Wikipedia, the online community values truth and will call you out if you try and pull a fast one. Chances are, if it’s a hoax, our fellow twitterites will expose it.
2) Is there a source link? Does the breaking 140 character news blurb have a link to back it up? If not, how much weight can it really hold? If so, does the link look legitimate or is it posted in the opinions column on The Onion?
3) Does it appear via other news channels? Did you also hear the news on the radio? The T.V.? Did you receive a telegram? A messenger pigeon? These non-web news channels are (hopefully) a bit more reliable, so chances are, it has a better chance of being legitimate if it appears across more channels.
3 ½) Are you using common sense? You could view this half-point one of two ways: either this is the most obvious step, thus worth only half a point, or online users are only using half their brains. Really, does it make sense that twelve celebrities died mere hours after MJ? I sometimes feel people would scurry to the store to stock up on bottled water if a Top Twitter Trending Topic was #worldrunningoutofwater.
At the end of the day, nothing is full-proof and we can’t be 100% sure of anything…but we can at least take Jeff Goldblum at his word (or at least his tweet) and admit that he is, indeed, alive.
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| Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed | ||||
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This article is from Dustin Diehl
I love writing, I love reading, I love movies, I love cats, but most of all, I love a lil space opera called Star Wars...
Dustin has written 26 posts.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Well done!
WOE jeff goldblum rocks
Yep, don’t believe all “the bank is bankrupt, the sky is falling” tweets…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8143806.stm
I wish MJ’s death was a fake!!