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Technology & Innovation

When Twitters Gets It Wrong

In some cases, such as the Giffords shooting and Tunisian revolution, Twitter has proven a real-time news network. But what happens when the medium spreads disinformation?

Twitter’s great strength is that it allows anyone to publish, and re-publish, information instantly, and distribute that information to thousands of people within minutes. But when a mistake gets distributed, there’s no single source that can send out a correction. That’s the double-edged sword such a network represents. Perhaps—since we all make up this real-time news network—it’s incumbent on all of us to do the correcting, even if it’s just by re-tweeting corrections and updates as eagerly as we re-tweeted the original.


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