Social Stories That Right Themselves

We've all heard the complaints from newsrooms and editors that you can't trust Twitter.  It's too fast, it publishes factoids that aren't right: it can't be trusted.

But two stories this week appear to show that stories emerging through social media actually follow a similar track to stories making their way though a newsroom.

In the middle of the week the "RIP Jackie Chan" rumor was quickly righted by Jackie Chan's own Facebook page.  Even TheeAdamSandler, an Adam Sandler parody account on Twitter, perhaps somewhat ironically pulled out the all the stops to end that nonsense.  The hoax died fast enough not to make it into the mainstream news in the U.S., but left security pundits wondering where it came from.

Later in the week NPR's Andy Carvin rebuilt the thread of a story that social media found, misinterpreted and then corrected, all in a very short time.  The story concerned the origin of some munitions found in Libya.  It began with a photo of a mortar round on a Facebook page.  There was a star on the mortar round which, Carvin writes, led to a claim that the mortar round had been made in Israel.  But, after some back and forth, it turned out the star indicated the type of round - a flare.  Carvin tells the whole story here.

Social media is a source, and it's as likely to be wrong as any other source.  But in addition to that, social media behaves like any other organization looking for an answer.  In that sense it behaves like a newsroom, positing a hypothesis and then backing it with information until it begins to look something like a fact we can all agree on.

In a newsroom a reporter comes across a piece of information.  It's something he heard at a meeting, something he saw in the street or maybe a story sent to him in an e-mail.  It has some interesting detail in it.  If it looks interesting he investigates.  Some stories turn out to be true and have value.  Some don't.

The difference between the newroom story and what happens in the world of social media is that the investigation is done in public by anyone who wants to join in.  It's a process that's untidy and out of control.  But it's like a ship in a storm.  It will either sink or bob upright in the end.