Peter Reek over at the Smart Savvy blog wrote recently about the Swine Flu & Twitter. He picked up on something I’ve heard some murmurs about — that people were using Twitter to pass along misinformation about the disease. But Peter also goes on to point out:
Think of the tweets from the Hudson River plane crash, or the earthquakes in China. These examples weren’t just noise, they were real time news providing valuable insight into the calamities.
The information on the Swine Flu might be “motivated by desires to fit in and to do what one’s friends do” right now, when hard facts about the crisis is limited, however when pertinent, urgent information becomes available, Twitter will become the first channel of information for a large audience.
Peter’s words had me doing some thinking. Are people using Twitter as a source for news? In some ways, I think the difference between the examples (the plane crash in the Hudson River and the Chinese earthquake) falls into the urgency of the news — the fact that they were breaking news. This meant that most of the Twitter noise was, in fact, coming from ground zero and involved individuals speaking of their own experience. Now, with the Swine Flu there is very limited information — and a whole lot of speculation.
And of course, people must always consider the credibility of the source of their information.
But I”m curious — do people use Twitter as a news source? What kind of information do people accept as being credible when it comes through Twitter?