How Accurate is the Twitter, Facebook Accuracy Experiment?
January 28, 2010 by Summer
Five journalists from Canadian, French, Belgian and Swiss radio stations are trying to find out how reliable Twitter and Facebook are regarding hard news. Starting February 1, the reporters will travel to a remote Perigord, France farmhouse and only have access to the outside world via the two networking sites. According to AFP/Google News:
“This experiment will enable us to take a hard look at all the myths that exist about Facebook and Twitter,” said Helene Jouan, a senior editor at France Inter, one of the stations that is sending a journalist.
The experiment poses some interesting questions: How will the journalists verify accuracy of stories? And how will they decide when to report the “news” to their respective audiences? From the AFP:
Trying to sort the wheat from the chaff without access to these other sources will be a difficult task for the four men and one woman confined to the farmhouse in Perigord.
Very true. But, there are a few issues with the experiment. For example, at the time this blog was posted, the five journalists were following 852 Twitter users, combined. That seems like a pretty small sample for the basis of an experiment of this magnitude. And, I wonder if they are considering the sources of their followers? For instance, are they following childhood friends or traditional media such as CNN International? Do you think that Facebook Friends and the Twitter equivalent are more likely to post news because the experiment has been announced?
Despite the obvious problems with the experiment, I can’t wait to see how it pans out. In fact, I’m already *following each reporter. I’d just recommend taking their findings with a grain of salt … but if you’re in the communication profession, you already knew that.
*Note: Since all tweets in this list will be in a language other than English, check out this quick video on how to translate Twitter updates. Hopefully, the powers-that-be at TweetDeck will soon create an auto-translate feature for groups.
Photo credit: Rob Enslin
Tags: Facebook, Social Media, Twitter