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Originally Posted by Flashpoint
Has twitter ever done anything good?
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Originally Posted by Acey
Aside from breaking every piece of news posted to this site the internet in the last however many years?
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Originally Posted by afc wimbledon
All that twitter did was get the news out 5 or 10 minutes quicker than Facebook or Reuters. It would all get out anyway.
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The thing is, Twitter also gets out a lot of lies and B.S. that would never be published in any other form of media. How many times, even here on CP, has somebody reported something as news based a tweet that turned out to be totally false? Must be hundreds by now.
Fortunately, CPers as a group are pretty good at spotting fake accounts and debunking erroneous tweets. But Twitter itself is not good at that, because Twitter doesn't do context. You might subscribe to the Twitter feed of the guy who says that cute kitten pictures cause nose cancer, and not to the feeds of the 367 oncologists who point out that this is just a lie made up as clickbait. By the time you find out it's a lie, you've already re-tweeted it to all your buddies and the lie has gone viral. On a forum like this, if somebody says cute kitten pictures cause nose cancer, you'll see 53 replies in the same thread ridiculing the fool, and that's the end of it.
Twitter kind of reminds me of string theory. Some physicists like string theory because it seems to predict everything that happens in the universe. But a growing number have decided that it's fundamentally useless, because it also predicts all kinds of things that don't happen. And it does not provide any mechanism to separate the truth from the lies.
In the case we're discussing, TSN would never have reported this rumour if it had been reported to them as a regular news story. They only did it because they were using Twitter as a substitute for research, and forgot to apply any kind of journalistic standards to the tweets they were re-publishing. They deserve to get hammered for choosing that particular tweet to put on the air. And unless the original tweeter can actually prove his allegations, he deserves to get hammered for libel.