There’s an interesting trending topic on Twitter right now: Prop 8. Thousands of people are retweeting that the California ballot measure which restricted same-sex marriage has been overturned. The only problem? It hasn’t been.
What’s happening is that everyone is retweeting the message with a link to an article in the LA Times saying that the gay marriage ban has been overturned. But those people aren’t looking at the date of the article. It was published a year ago, on May 16, 2008. Prop 8 passed in November 2008, so unless we’re in some kind of Lost-style time warp, nothing has changed.
This incident highlights a downside of Twitter. While it’s great at disseminating information quickly, it’s just as good at disseminating false information quickly. And if a lot of people are saying it — as thousands are here — it must be true, right? Wrong.
What’s worse is that the LA Times itself is to blame here. They tweeted out a link to the story earlier today, and deleted it. They’ve since issue a retraction — in the form of a tweet, naturally.
Update: According to Danny Sullivan, before the LA Times tweeted out the old story, ABC News had a story about Prop 8 being overturned that people started tweeting out also.
A real-time Wikipedia?
Yeah, Wikipedia isn’t much better.
Just goes to show you that intelligence of the masses isn’t always so intelligent.
One thing that TechCrunch could do is help Twitterers learn how to slow themselves down. Your first instinct should be to search for other sources. Here’s a search for Prop 8 which shows Tweets about the issue: http://friendfe...search?q=Prop+8 If you had done that even early you would have found out that this wasn’t correct news and it would have slowed you down enough to keep you from retweeting it. Even if you HAD retweeted it, you should include a link to a real time search so that other people can check out your news easily.
The other thing that SHOULD have gotten more people to be skeptical: the mainstream press, particularly the newspaper press, rarely is the only one to break such a story anymore. If something really big like this happened there would have been THOUSANDS of people tweeting original reports from the Capital. Again, if your first impulse is to go to a real time search engine and do some searches before running off to retweet then this stuff wouldn’t happen, or if it did, would get cleaned up a lot faster.
For the record, I saw 3 tweets about this on my stream, went to Google News & CNN and saw nothing.
I clicked one of the links and saw “May 16th, 2008″ and thought, “oh jeez, people aren’t even reading the article.”
yeah that won’t work. what we need is better tools to sort all this stuff out. people won’t change the way they tweet on a mass scale. won’t happen.
AMEN, Robert. Although it’s the news outlet/journalist responsibility to report accurate news, ultimately, it’s the people who MUST take responsibility in double-checking the source — whether they like it or not.
What we have here is a potential “War of the Worlds” redeux (although of course with all of our sources, this would be next to impossible, but with today’s gene pool, you never know). However, back then, there was little one could do to check a story’s source (even if it was a story about aliens from Mars — really??). Today, there’s NO excuse — just stupidity.
For awhile I thought Techcrunch was down … more than 2 hours without a post on twitter
Best. Post. Ever.
I’d tweet that.
do you think that when something this obviously wrong happens, twitter should be responsible and maybe even REMOVE the “trending topic” manually?
No.
They should fall on their sword and shut twitter down for good. Yes on proposition TW, ban twitter in California.
classic … it seems most people don’t bother to look at what they are re-tweeting … SMRT
That’s impossible, I thought Twitter was the new form of professional journalism.
Well humorously, the LA Time was to blame for tweeting it out.
MG: you are correct. Here’s the original Tweet (take a screen capture before they delete this one too): http://friendfe...t-overturns-gay
I know Jason! I don’t understand, I read it on Twitter, it must be true!
ABC also had a Prop 8 Story up this morning, that evidently has been pulled. The address was:
http://abcnews....tory?id=4859659
It had a story about the SC overturning Prop 8 and the celebrations that were ensuing.
This happened on MSN a while back, there was a shit storm when someone circulated an article on the BBC claiming msn would start charging money to use their services, the article was from 2001. It happens so much now, It’s not really a downside of twitter, more the entire internet.
Prop 8…
We used those kinds of airplanes in Alaska to kill protected bear species.
Prop 8…
Famous singing group form the 80’s – in Poland
Prop 8…
How many times I asked my heterosexual wife to marry me.
Prop 8…
Good thing God is a fictional character fabricated by some skirt-wearing hippies some 3000 years ago. Because if the Dude was actually real… oh my, I would be in big doo-doo.
Oh, look! Thunders and lightning outside!
Must be the hurricane season starting…
Poof !
Twitter is essentially the mob, hopelessly unfiltered, noisy, and as destructive as it is productive. No replacing journalists any time soon.
Hauser: it was a professional journalist who started this at the Los Angeles Times. Here’s the original Tweet: http://friendfe...t-overturns-gay
So don’t go blaming the mob when it was incited by a pro.
It’s still not clear (see Danny Sullivan below) that this was started by a pro; apparently the LA Times was just adding fuel to the fire. I hope journalists don’t make a habit of blindly re-tweeting all the white noise on Twitter.
This whole thing reaffirms that news needs to be curated and validated by professionals. The LA Times, in this case, was doing the opposite.
It doesn’ t matter who started it…that isn’t the point
CA is going to burn in HELL!!
Probably, but nothing to do with Prop 8.
Hope not… Been to Texas and it sucks….
Twitter enables a faster and more viral form of those stupid chain emails because folks weren’t smart enough to check snopes.com before hitting fwd.
perhaps Twitter need to implement a filter process that allows them to flag specific URLs and if folks keep tweeting or RT’ing they can append a warning.
just goes to show there should be a basic proficiency test before people are allowed to use a tool like the interwebs
InstantGratification Techcrunch in favor of Prop 8! http://bit.ly/KYQ32
2 minutes ago from web
loling at the whole situation from miami
I guess I am confused. It would be helpful to get some clarification:
Isn’t a basic tenet of twitter that information need not be true? I mean, there are tons of fake profiles–both commercial and personal–and the system itself is based on anonymity, which reinforces a lack of accountability. There was actually a really great TC article comparing myspace to twitter a month or so ago that made this point.
What do you think?
Just wanted to add that I’ve proven that 50% of people will retweet you without reading the link. HONESTLY.
I did testing about a year ago over the course of the week with tweets like, “don’t forget to pray to jesus every day and ask forgiveness for your sins…”
I would then post a link after that to some softcore pornography site. I would only see a 50% drop in my usual amount of retweets for “inspirational quotes”
People on Twitter are sheeple and it’s a fact. Say something inspiring, quotable and joyous and they will latch on an retweet the hell out of you regardless of what link you put after it.
Perfect example of this. http://twitter....atus/1809009273
In my upcoming book, this will be a very large portion. I’ve spent 3 years analyzing how people using social media (specifically twitter) and written case studies that prove a lot of insanely interesting things about the follower mentality and our need for acceptance by everyone.
This is a perfect example of this.
Twitter is a fad for morons
it seems to me that not too long ago everybody on tv was sending people to their myspace page…now it’s Twitter…Will it be twitter in 3 years? probably not
It’s NOT “According to Twitter” it is “According to people on Twitter”. Twitter is just a view into the public discussion, do you use Twitter as a source of news?! Absolutely not! Do some people use it as a source of news? YES. Are there gossip-minded idiots? YES. This is not news, people have been wrong for a GABILLION YEARS.
between the prop 8 disastrophe and people asking for an invite to the wolframalpha thing in a comment, it’s clear people have forgotten how to read.
Well said…that wolfram alpha comments section was the worst read of all time
I tracked down the original tweet that seems to have started this all — wasn’t the LA Times, but that contributed later. Gets into the ABC News story and a few other things:
http://daggle.c...er-started-639/
Interesting. Thanks Danny.
At least people fixed it right away.
“According to Twitter”
That’s just more irresponsible journalism MG.
Same as me (or someone with 500,00 followers) tweeting “TechCrunch says Arrington marries long time companion Jason Kincaid” because it was in comments.
Oh yes it is.
And the SV/ Friendfeed Twitter Hater Club is all to happy to have the LA TIMES screw up be hung on Twitter.
How long until someone uses this “social loophole” to manipulate stocks. It happened several times w/ false information beng disseminated by blogs and Twitter makes things an order of magnitude faster.
hey, everybody, let’s do the time warp–again!
Dude. Don’t you have a personal blog for this stuff, MG? I fail to see how this is “Technology News”. It looks like another excuse for you to blog about Twitter!
I’m not really on the bandwagon of “TC Blogs Too Much About Twitter”, but I swear that posts like this certainly have potential to bring more people to that conclusion.
Thank you. Finally there is not obscenely overwhelming volume of Twitter articles today. This blog is back to having interesting content. Keep it this way please.
Twitter sucks TC shutit about twitter already im pretty sure if we wanted to hear about twitter we would go their ourselves. Twitter is a pointless website/service whatever its a complete waste of time for anyone with a real-life. MG apparently your on there a lot. So im sure you can see where im going with this but you need to stop fondling Twitter and write something different for once.
Long live Prop 8
With no comment on the Prop 8 issues, this just proves that many, many, many people on the internet are just plain stupid regurgitaters of misinformation – especially when its an emotional issue. It’s no wonder they elected a man with no military experience, no executive experience, no economic background, and who was never married to a previous president.
This is how the morons lost the last 2 election, they believe their fake polls. !st of all we did not need these last 2 elections because by definition of marriage at the writting of the state constitution it meant only man/woman. These justices never have any legal right to render any decision over-rulling the constitution. And the 18,000 gay marriages were never legal. There are plenty of people not register and did not vote which are against gay marriage.
This is how the morons lost the last 2 election, they believed their fake polls. 1st of all we did not need these last 2 elections because by definition of marriage at the writing of the state constitution it meant only man/woman. These justices never have any legal right to render any decision over-ruling the constitution. And the 18,000 gay marriages were never legal. There are plenty of people not registered and did not vote which are against gay marriage.
See this is one of the many problems with Tweaker… it;s like the chain letter from hell… I give it 6 more mos max before people wake up and go “Derrrr… you know what.. I don’t want everyone to know what I’m doing every minute of the day”
nice moniker
I love how TC and Scoble are all over this like it is the most important thing in the world. You guys are idiots. Twitter is a poorly built toy that can be easily gamed by it’s millions of anonymous users. It has no practical value. Stop trying to make it something it cannot be.
what does prop 8 have to do with a TECH Blog that is supposed to focus on start ups????
You can’t not report about twitter in some way can you? I mean come on, some one twitter something in acurate and others started re-twitter it…
A TWITTER RUMOR is worthy of a Tech Crunch article???? You TOOL
well, twitter is a recent(ish) startup. It’s a massively innovative use of technology, enabling uses that simply weren’t even thought about before twitter, and this story illustrates an interesting social phenomenon. Why’s it not story-worthy? Just because you’re sick of twitter?
hah, and Ka-Boom the problem with non-expert sourced information blows up again. Now we just need a few of those users to edit wikipedia, and mainstream news source to check wikipedia and the whole thing will spiral out of control.
interesting…you know how when coca-cola was introduced, the spokesperson said coke by accident and everyone was convinced that the drink was named coke and not the actual name, coca-cola, so the company started using the the name coke? well twitter could be a total political game changer. EVERYONE retweet tht old dusty article and maybe if all are convinced, california would be forced to overturn prop 8!!!
Twitter… A Thundering Herd of ADD Morons.
As gawker says, this is what happens when you communicate 140 characters at a time. Bound to happen – although clearly it proves that this issue is something dear – good or bad – to many people.
The latest rumor on Prop 8..
http://tinyurl.com/goofy-gavin