Earlier this month the BBC alleged on a news program that a former Tory politician was a child molester. The report, which didn’t actually name the man, was untrue.
But a frenzy of speculation began on Twitter, with thousands of people either tweeting or retweeting the name of Alistair McAlpine — a.k.a. Lord McAlpine, an adviser to Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister. The BBC has since apologized for sloppy reporting and coughed up £185,000 ($294,000) in damages. But some of those who tweeted about it are facing a probable lawsuit.
Of course many of those people were merely doing what most people do on Twitter: passing along gossip, the way they would on Facebook, by text message or by email. But unlike those, Twitter is completely public.
“Twitter is not just a closed coffee shop among friends,” says Andrew Reid, McAlpine’s lawyer. “It goes out to hundreds of thousands of people and you must take responsibility for it. It is not a place where you can gossip and say things with impunity, and we are about to demonstrate that.”
During SuperStorm Sandy, there were deliberate false tweets getting out that were re-tweeted by news organizations. Can the news organizations be sued for not investigating these? Or could they issue the standard disclaimer, "according to this twitter member, the Holland Tunnel has flooded completely killing 20 people."
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
That's been one of the biggest complaints of how Twitter is set up - false info can get re-Tweeted so quickly but corrections rarely if ever make it out, and never to the extent that the original info was spread. Knowing who is credible and worthy of re-Tweeting takes time to discover and most don't put that much effort into it, or look for that instant "gotcha" and don't care if it's wrong. Reliable Twitter users correct for those problems, bt it's like any other tool, it gets mis-used.
The question of liability for news orgs should be brought up, but my guess is that Twitter itself will suffer more than they will. If people don't think they can rely on it, it will cease to be a useful tool.
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
