I’m sure there are Twitter zones that I’m unaware of, but where I hang out, people don’t tweet about boyfriends or zits or clothes or what they’re doing at the moment — they mostly tweet about current events. It’s generally a congenial place, made so because we tend to follow and be followed by like-minded people as we pass around our take on the politics that affect all our lives.
Which is why I’m disturbed by a disagreement I had tonight with a Twitter friend about accuracy. Passions often run high in Twitter, but that’s no reason to pass along something you can’t confirm as the truth. In my mind that’s a contemporary GOP tactic, and we don’t want to stoop to that level. But I didn’t get a chance to mention that in the several tweets we exchanged because she hung up on me — or the Twitter equivalent.
Journalists have a basic rule: if you can’t confirm something from at least one other credible source, you sit on it. I haven’t been a working journalist in a long time, but I follow this rule no matter where or what I’m writing — whether it’s here, or in Twitter, or occasionally for the local paper.
I do my best to make sure that if I pass something along that’s not an opinion, it’s factual, whether here or in Twitter. Often before I tweet, I’ll look something up, to make sure I’m on solid ground. It’s not hard, thanks to Google, and it doesn’t take long to figure out how to tell the credible sources apart from the crackpots. There’s a community effort going on, and a lot of people have done some serious research to support their reporting. We’re foolish if we don’t take advantage of that before we blog or tweet.
Liberal Buzz 