Check your Twitter facts

In Digital, Media, Social Media on March 14, 2011 by kiltforhire Tagged: checks, email, Facebook, facts, honest, truth, twitter

You know what? It only takes one minute out of your life to check some facts before you click ‘enter’.
A long time ago in another period of my life I felt like the last bastion of truth and honesty when it came to fighting against the evil curse of the ‘forwarded email’ which contained alleged facts like ‘did you know you eat 8 spiders while you sleep through your lifetime’. Total and utter rubbish.
I spent a small piece of my time linking people to Snopes.com and telling them to check facts before sending useless and pointless emails filling people with untruths.
And now with the advent of social media we have the tweet and retweet. Over the past few days since the terrible tragedy in Japan people have been tweeting about the deaths of Pokemon creator Satoshi Tajiri and Hello Kitty creator Yuko Yamaguchi in the tsunami. Only they aren’t dead.
Neither is Maria Ozawa. Who is allegedly some adult film actress…
Over the past few months Twitter has been aflame with the alleged deaths of Justin Bieber, Jim Carrey and Charlie Sheen. Hell, a guy on the forum I use made a fake story about Jeff Goldblum as a joke to a friend which went way out of control and had a presenter on the national news talk about the story as if it was true!! Mental
Can we all just stop.
Can we not just retweet every single thing we read on Twitter.
It makes you the equivalent of the idiot who spammed me by email with those idiotic untruths years ago.
Take one minute out of your life and research something before you decide to retweet it.
Take one minute out of your life and research something before you decide to Facebook it.
Take one minute out of your life and research something before you decide to forward it in a goddam email.
C’mon let’s get the truth out there more often.

6 Comments

6 Responses to “Check your Twitter facts”

other_pete March 15, 2011 at 12:09 am | Reply

tl;dr
- kiltforhire March 15, 2011 at 12:23 am | Reply
  
  Well that’s just plain lazy!
Alex March 15, 2011 at 1:56 am | Reply

Well said Scott! Especially to the point of emailing people have died, that’s not nice especially after the disaster in Japan, haven’t enough people died and enough heartache without posting malicious untruths
cale March 15, 2011 at 11:28 am | Reply

Good old general advice that we should have learnt years ago. Tho i am guilty of it myself i am sure.
Gloriaeffe March 15, 2011 at 11:55 am | Reply

So. True.
It’s like those awfully annoying email chains, when no one checks if they’re true (or still true) and simply fwd to ALL contacts.
My uncle, head physician of radiotherapy at the Cancer Institute in Italy, some years ago received an email chain about some family asking for money to help with their son affected by cancer. My uncle, still un-used to these chains, contacted the father, willing to offer his medical help pro-bono.
Well, the father said his son had died 7 years earlier and he was completely fed up with receiving emails and calls from strangers reminding him about the tragedy every day. He never wrote that email, either…
franksting March 15, 2011 at 12:11 pm | Reply

It’s circular isn’t it. Here’s what I wrote in January http://franksting.net.au/2011/01/29/whispers-trust/
Let me be harsh. What we are seeing here is the uninformed embracing the sharing culture and the creators of the content trading on this penchant for sharing any old crap