A tweet on the street can be the fastest way to spread news, but it can also be the cause of chaos
You might have heard about the “chinese whispers” that spread across Twitter yesterday.
The original tweet was from @candicecbailey at around 11:00 in the morning and said “Street style shooting in Oxford Circus for ASOS and Diet Coke. Let me know if you’re around!!”
A couple of minutes and several tweets later this had turned into “Apparently theres a shooting at Oxford Circus, gunmen on the move. We’ve been told to say in.” @helenium
After another 10 minutes only, people had started to wonder if this was actually true: “Apparently there’s been a shooting in Oxford Circus and the gunman is onda loose. Hoax/Real…hmmm.” from @charlzwithaz . Twitter users started retweeting stating that the information was official and came from the police itself.
However, according to the Telegraph, this information did come from a genuine source. “The rumours began when a secret Scotland Yard training dossier on how to tackle a rogue gunman was somehow leaked to the microblogging site. It appeared to be a live police commentary about an ongoing incident involving a man running amuck with a gun.”
In a couple of hours, “Oxford Circus” became a trending topic in the United Kingdom and the twittersphere was alight with tweeters own interpretation of the rumors.
A survey from Pear Analytics of 2,000 tweets conducted in August 2009, found that more than 40 per cent was pointless babble, another nearly 40 percent were conversational and less than five percent were news.
This got me thinking of the five journalists who put Twitter and Facebook to what they’ve called the “Big Brother” test in early 2010.
For 5 days, they locked themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites.
The results from the study were mixed. Most of the news was considered repetitive and due to the 140 character restriction, there is a significant lack of analysis and the quality can definitely not be guaranteed.
One thing that can’t be denied is that the information spreads much faster via Twitter than through other traditional media and Twitter should definitely be used to spread the word. But we recommend you take the time to read your tweet before you hit send to avoid any scandals or misunderstandings
