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Jasmine Gardner: News travels fast in cyberspace but can we trust it?

http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/jasmine-gardner-news-travels-fast-in-cyberspace-but-can-we-trust-it-9159845.html

Morgan Freeman has died three times: once on Twitter, twice on Facebook. During Hurricane Sandy, a shark swam up the streets of New Jersey. In the London riots of 2011 a tiger was let loose from London Zoo. And this week Manchester United boss David Moyes was sacked.

Of course all this is nothing more than social media rumour — much to the relief, no doubt, of Moyes, who had been tabled by tweeters to be losing his job at 2:30pm on Wednesday, after Manchester United’s 2-0 defeat in the Champions’ League to Olympiakos the day before. The gossip spread quickly among fans: by midweek, bookmakers had 8/11 odds on Moyes being the next Premier League manager to leave his job. Maybe Moyes will be comforted to discover that a new project involving King’s College London called Pheme is attempting, over the next 18 months, to build a web app that would state whether twitter statements are true or false. Until then working out whose news you wish to repeat (or gossip you wish to retweet) online will be an ever-growing minefield.

• In the US a third of all adults under 30 are said to get their news from social media, with half of all Twitter users receiving their newsflashes in 140 characters. 
• According to Fast Company, social media has overtaken porn consumption as the number one activity on the web — one cheap thrill superseded by another. 
• More significantly, a survey late last year by market researcher Populous showed that in Britain, Twitter is now an everyday news source for 55 per cent of opinion formers. In other words, a majority of influential people get their information from a potentially unreliable source.

Yet if trust is in trouble, is that the fault of unreliable people or an unreliable method of communication? 

That applies to online opinion too. Twitter suggests people to follow based on those with whom we already interact. The more we curate from where and whom we receive information (through selective following and tailored news apps) the less likely we ever are to find out about something outside that remit. Meanwhile, the web continues to do this for us, algorithmically, with Google showing us personalised search results, based on our browser history, and Facebook editing out the feeds of friends we talk to least.

In his TED talk on the subject, internet activist Eli Pariser said: “Instead of a balanced information diet you can end up surrounded by information junk food” — where everything we see online is only what we enjoy believing. On Facebook, unsurprisingly, most people’s news consumption comes through friends and family.

In terms of rumour, what we have done (to borrow from the film Meet the Parents) is narrow down our “circle of trust”. It would likely matter little whether this circle was online or off: we begin to think we can rely on all the information we hear from that group.

Sam Gardiner, the schoolboy who fooled Twitter into believing he was Samuel Rhodes, a football journalist with insider knowledge, observed: “With technology, when people chose to be dishonest they can do it at scale.” Indeed we can — and we want to. Not only is Twitter a place for influencers to find information; it has become the place for wannabe influencers. Among the general public, just 15 per cent get information from Twitter: so the majority of us bothering to share there have something to promote or a desire to be heard. And such is the repugnance among tweeps for sharing old information that when we find a rumour, the desire to be the first to retweet it can outweight the desire to be right. Twitter hasn’t taught us to be more trusting or more gullible but simply to speed up our decision-making when it comes to spreading gossip. The danger is we value speed over truth — as David Moyes can ruefully reflect this week.

Personally, I think news thats posted on Facebook and Twitter isn't reliable because it comes from anyone. Anyone can go online and tweet a piece of news that they've made up. This just shows that people need to stop going online to facebook and Twitter and just find their news on real news websites such as The Guardian and News Online or Daily Mail. Those websites contain real hard proof facts and news. Twitter  and Facebook overall isn't a trustworthy source.