Does a Retweet Equal an Endorsement? That's the question posed on the Old Media New Tricks blog. Would a tweet be interesting if it was untrue? The sender of the retweet is implying at the very least endorsement of its source if not the item itself, and that is one of the things that makes retweets of breaking news so untrustworthy.
The lack of integrity behind the Twitter retweet is well documented, from its marginal value as a measure of influence to its questionable role in the accurate republication of links and other content. Most Twitter identities are not verified, so the source of most tweets cannot be fully verified. The content of those tweets often points to other tweets, or to blogs written by amateurs (non professional journalists.) This lack of provenance is bad enough, but add that the sender of the retweet can (sometimes must) omit or change information, and the questionable quality of the original information, and NO ONE should be surprised that so many retweets are pure garbage.
Yet in a moment of excitement, when a news story breaks, or when an issue is highly emotional, few people think about these things, instead retweeting like mad as if passing on AP wire stories or Wall Street Journal articles that have been compiled by professional journalists and checked by professional fact checkers. Sure the AP and every other major news outlet possess bias, and make mistakes, and fall victim to sensationalism, but there are at least some standards and controls, and there are also corrective actions that can and are taken when something is misreported. On Twitter, the best to hope for is a "my bad."
I think Jay Rosen is being overly charitable when he says, (quoting Old Media New Tricks, not Jay here) "not to expect open systems like Twitter to behave in the same manner expected of editorial systems." I like the McLuhanesque idea behind applying the term "open system" to Twitter, but I think it's Twitter is far too open and uncontrolled, lacking the processes and oversight that other open systems, like the open source software movement, take for granted.
Tags: retweet, Jay Rosen, Twitter, endorsement, open system
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