Delete that tweet? Social news sharing and the Giffords shootings

By now we’re familiar with The Error. I’m talking about how NPR (then Reuters, then MSNBC) declared Rep. Gabrielle Giffords dead within hours of the Tucson shootings, then had to retract the report after it turns out they had bad information. Then, of course, had to do the public mea culpa.

Errors happen in journalism. They aren’t our finest hour and certainly aren’t the thing that we aspire to, but we see this stuff happen every so often. Especially in breaking news situations where things are developing and people are emotional, that pull to confirm things quickly and get information out there is strong, and it’s almost an automated process. I remember on 9/11, for instance, how crazy the newsroom was. There is a lot of pressure and people don’t always think straight.

But, I’m not here to beat that dead horse. There’s plenty of coverage if you are interested, and journalism students in particular would do well to absorb this. No, I would rather talk about social media’s role in the way information spread.

Pre-Twitter, the way the misinformation about Giffords’ death spread would have been much simpler and generally limited to pro media. Twitter is a different thing, though, and so misinformation spread virally across networks even after the news had been retracted.

The #wjchat last week was instructive about how we’re trying to wrestle with this. First, news is a process, and social media really exposes that process in ways the public hadn’t before seen. This is a good thing, I think, but the question as to whether the public understands this is another thing. Do people really know the difference between news reporting and seeing the sausage being made? This is crucial because both of these things are happening in public, on media, and sometimes on the same platform.

The second question, whether we ought to delete tweets that have incorrect information, is a bigger one. The #wjchat and all the posts in the blogosphere have been an interesting exercise and are worth reading. People seemed mostly to fall into three camps about deleting an erroneous tweet:

• Delete it
• Keep the tweet but repost correct information
• Delete the tweet, but post that you did so and repost correct information

The first one strikes me as fundamentally dishonest, and we don’t want that in our news. This isn’t Soviet Russia; we don’t delete the record and pretend like things didn’t happen. I realize the need to protect your brand, but to think that coverups in the truth-telling business are a better alternative is nonsense.

The second one has weaknesses, because people could miss the repost but have still retweeted the earlier information, which still can spread. The third one has the same weaknesses because people could still pass on old retweets in 2nd and 3rd generation retweets, but at least it prevents new first-generation retweets of bad information.

What the options do is point out the issues that come with information spread across networks. Twain famously remarked “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes,” a nod to the reach of information in people networks. The motivation to spread new news, particularly pressing or bad news, is instinctively stronger than the value offered in spreading corrections. We’re wired for negative news (disclosure: I’m an author on that study).

I personally don’t have a strong preference for the second and third options, but whatever you choose I prefer it be done transparently. If you delete a tweet, you should tell your audience, and merely posting the correct information isn’t transparency. You should note that you made an error. If you leave it up, explain why and note that it’s not an easy issue.

But just as journalism in the age of social media is a process, you have to show the audience the process of how you go about trying to repair the damage.

That’s a main part of the equation, but I’d add that I’m surprised there hasn’t been more coverage of user processes. I saw a lot more link sourcing in my networks on Saturday, and that is an improvement; clearly the audience of user-sharers is learning.

I want to add one note of value to the conversation. I did an experiment with one of my Twitter followers @ today with the Twitter retweet button and learned something new. When a post that is retweeted with the official button is deleted, the retweets disappear from a user’s stream as well. The implications of this are huge: when a news organization deletes an erroneous tweet, all retweets that use the button disappear too. It makes it impossible to further spread misinformation.

The reason I mention this is because a lot of us still use the manual RT version of retweeting. I’m not a huge fan of the retweet button because I like to add value when retweeting, and that means doing it manually. But today I saw a great argument for using Twitter’s retweet function. In breaking news situations, it allows news organizations to mass delete problematic tweets.

So perhaps that’s the argument for deletion-then-retraction. It won’t ward off manual retweets from spreading, but at least it will delete a good amount of error from the system. The other suggestion, based on what we know, would be that Twitter formally add a way to edit or annotate a Tweet, knowing that all those retweets would change. Either way would be a workable solution built on transparency.

But because audience responsibility is my theme this week, it seems, I’ll add this. I think we should adopt a stance of using the retweet button in breaking news situations where there is a lot of confusion. The audience has a critical role to play in the process of news production, as Dan Gillmor argues in his new book Mediactive. Part of our own evolution might be to realize we are all curators now and that means altering our process for retweeting in order to help, not harm, the media ecosystem. The retweet button, it seems, would be a good solution