TWITTER; NEWS, RUMOR, OR GOSSIP?  

I hope you all survived ‘Carnaval’ last week!

Did you still remember my last blog about the privacy of social networking sites? And did you not randomly post all your drunk and embarrassing pictures of the last days? It could work against you.

Today, I want to talk to you about ‘Carnaval’. As some of you might know and noticed by my soft G, I live in the southern Province of the Netherlands; Limburg.  Here we all celebrated ‘Carnaval’ last week. Moreover, you could not have missed the fact that it was ‘Carnaval’, especially not if you are on Twitter.  For five days long (Thursday-Tuesday), the majority of the incoming Tweets contained messages from people having fun, drinking and partying.  

It is not the first time that I talk about Twitter, in this blog I want to talk about Twitter in a more negative sense: Twitter as a fast news source or a fast way to spread around rumors and gossip?

It cannot be denied that social media, such as Twitter, play an important part in bringing news. More often Twitter is the first one communicating about ‘breaking’ news. This was also the case with the flight crash nearby Schiphol in 2009. Twitter, was the first one reporting the crash.  Even before the crash was communicated on newspaper websites and television, the news was spread around via Twitter. Furthermore, Twitter played an important role in the Egyptian revolution.  Via Twitter people were asked to gather and demonstrate against the government.

Now, you might think what is the relationship between Twitter, news and ‘Carnaval’?  Here it is; last week I had to work outside on a big square where thousands of people were celebrating ‘Carnaval’. During work, my colleagues and I experienced a big ‘bang’ and felt the ground under our feed shake a little bit. After that we all saw a lot of smoke and small fire flames arouse from the back of the houses. These houses were situated around the square. The gas canisters of the mobile cafeteria were exploded and were on fire.  

However, what happened then was a lot of people Tweeting about the fire, and started to make things worse.  Approximately five minutes after the fire I already received Tweets with pictures about the fire. Moreover, someone tweeted that there were seriously harmed people. In addition, another person re-tweeted that he/she heard that there were three deadly victims. Not much later, I received a message from my friend, who was on holiday in Tenerife. She asked me if I was ok and did not get harmed, because she heard that there was a fire in the city center. In addition, another friend also sent me a message; she wanted to know what has happened. She heard that there was something going on, while she was celebrating ‘Carnaval’ in another village.  The news about the fire spread around very fast; partly thanks to Twitter.

In fact there was a big fire and the mobile cafeteria itself did not survive the fire.  However, people Tweeting about the fire made it a lot worse than it was. There were no seriously harmed people and most importantly nobody died. The next day, the local paper ‘Dagblad de Limburger’ reported in a short article about the fire

Watch the videos below to see the fire:

Did you know that Jody Bernal (@Jody_Bernal) died when he was on vacation in Switzerland?  In the beginning of March someone declared Jody Bernal dead via Twitter. News websites, like the ‘Telegraaf’, believed this Tweet and started to communicate the news via the newspaper website and even further via Twitter. This led to panic and confused family and friends of Jody Bernal. They had to read on the internet that he died. They did no hear a thing from him. In fact, Jody Bernal was not dead and he even did not go on holiday to Switzerland. He was planning to celebrate ‘Carnaval’ with his friends!

This fake rumor about Jody Bernal led to a lot of arousal in the media world. Well known newspaper websites like 'NOS' and 'Volkskrant' reported about the fake rumor that had been spread around via Twitter. They also reported about the 'Telegraaf' who had believed the fake rumor and started to spread it around.

The above examples made me question the ‘reliability’ of the medium. Can you trust every news fact that is published on Twitter? How do you know that someone is not exaggerating or spreading around a rumor to create panic amongst people, as was the case of the fire? However in this case the fire was made a lot worse than it was.  All those Tweets caused a lot of arousal and panic, even amongst people that did were at the ‘crime scene’.  But what would have happened, if people in de crowd notice this and started to panic, where should all those thousand people go to?

One thing is sure about Twitter, it is a really fast medium. However, I am not sure if this is always a positive aspect; in the case of the fire and Jody Bernal it is certainly not!

How do you think about Twitter as news source, is it reliable and can we randomly trust all news related Tweets?

Talk to you next week!