It’s been an amusing morning watching the waves caused in the Twitterverse by Brian Brigg’s satirical post on Twitter’s business model. A LOT of people passed the news on without any apparent awareness that it was satire. There was concern and even outrage at the idea of 500-character tweets. Some people were doing it with tongues firmly in cheek (I think — it was hard to tell), but most seemed happy to take the “announcement” at face value.
This came hard on the heels of a whole bunch of my Facebook friends spamming me with a transparently untrue “Facebook is going to delete your account if you don’t pass this on” message. Clearly, a lot of people are in need of a refresher course in bullshit detection.
If you are one of them, here are some ways to upgrade your satire and hoax detector. Do it now, before you get caught on April 1st!
- Pay attention to your own reaction. If you read something and think “that’s the stupidest/most horrendous/most unfair idea ever, are they mad?”, pause and read it again. You may be missing something (although yes, there are lots of stupid ideas out there).
- Consider context and source. If it’s April 1st or anywhere near, be cautious. Do the same when major news “breaks” on a blog you’ve never heard of — especially if there’s a great big sign on it containing the words “geek humor”.
- Verify with the original source. I can’t begin to stress how important this is. If everybody who passed on a Microsoft/Facebook/Nokia/antivirus vendor warning took the very simple step of going to the organisation’s home page to check it out, the rest of us would be spared a lot of eye-rolling and tedious deletion. In the Twitter case, they have a blog here that they actually post news on. If anybody wasn’t sure about the premium accounts story, this should have been the first port of call.
- Don’t retweet links you haven’t read. Enough said.
(It should be noted that I learned some of this stuff the hard way. I once fell for an April Fool story saying the Table Mountain upper cable station was going to be expanded by lifting the entire structure up into the air with a crane and building a new level at the bottom. That really drummed the “check context” message home.)
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Update a few hours later — I can scarcely believe it, but people are still passing on the story even after a high-profile debunking by Techcrunch. The Twitter Search stream is worth watching.
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
“Don’t retweet links you haven’t read. Enough said.”
AMEN!!
Twits who do that willy-nilly have lost my attention and my respect. I will happily click on a re-tweeted link that has some personal commentary along with it to prove that the person has actually READ the article and feels that it’ll add value.
Even a RT with a “is this true?” question is enough – at least is shows the person is not just being a lazy link spammer.
Perhaps the ability to rapidly disseminate info is microblogging’s worst enemy. People are too lazy to read past the headline and instead get caught up in the hype. They don’t bother to place what they’ve seen on Twitter in any context – by actually following the link, verifying the source (as Pam said) or even looking for the personal commentary that should accompany the Tweet (as cow_grrrl rightly states). Obviously, because reading with comprehension beyond 140 characters is so last year. End result: “Everyone else is jumping off the bride, so I will too!”
Hell, I’ll bet people got to the end of the last word of the first line and jumped to the line break for this sentence. Yes, you. I’m looking at you.
Anyway…
Speaking of bridges, I’ve got a bridge in San Francisco for sale. If you’re interested, you can DM me on Twitter.
Thanks for the comments, you two. Are we getting to a point where actually being able to read critically starts becoming a competitive advantage? I’d like to think so — with all the focus on doing things FAST, sometimes doing them PROPERLY is more important.
I don’t think we ever left that point.
That said, I did type “jumping off the bride”.
Scroll up and have look.
Maybe you didn’t pick it up.
Neither did I.
And ironically, all that serves to illustrate Pam’s point on reading critically rather well I think.
So it all worked out in the end.
I was diplomatically ignoring it
. Nobody is perfect – hence my inclusion of the Table Mountain story…
I think the “quality over quantity” argument comes into play … especially on Twitter where it seems to have evolved into a race for big follower numbers and all the “prestige” that comes from associated (trivial) gradings and ratings. It seems that some Twits have sacrificed a certain degree of responsibility in order to increase numbers as quickly as possible.
Hah. Wanted to post this link yesterday but the interwebs was coughing up a furball … this is interesting:
http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-read
I didn’t follow this at the time, but, wow, funny.
Reminds me how people get caught out – usually with hilarious results – for taking an Onion piece at face value. Latest one I’ve seen: http://www.buzzfeed.com/reddit/idiots-everywhere-fall-for-fake-onion-story