TIME: One of the main issues for journalists is this idea of differentiating between news and things that are a hoax. How can Twitter make it easier for journalists to figure out whether something is verified or not? SCHILLER: We have verified accounts, but a verified account doesn’t necessarily guarantee that the information contained within — the tweet from the verified user — is verified. And Twitter’s never going to be able to do that, with all of the billions of tweets that flow, there’s no way for us to know. But one of the things that we can do, and should do, and is definitely on my roadmap is to — because we hear this from a lot of news organizations — is to try to be a thought leader for the news industry about this. Not that we can solve it, but to help inform news organizations…So it’s a common question, and I think we can help socialize best practices around using Twitter to verify information. We do have certain tools. Dataminr, for instance, is one that doesn’t verify the tweet, but it gives you certain signals around individual tweets that can help. And we see a lot of news organizations that are doing interesting things, so that’s one of the things we want to do is try to help news organizations make sure that they can signal to their followers and try to reverse hoaxes, or reduce hoaxes, to the extent possible. Not just hoaxes, but misinformation — unintentional misinformation. One of the great things about Twitter is that even without our intervention, the fact is because so many people are listening on Twitter, that misinformation gets caught pretty quickly. So the Twitter crowd itself — the wisdom of the crowd plays in here. The more people are on Twitter, the more misinformation will be corrected with great speed. ti.me/1nhVJT9
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 15:27:36 +0000
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