The danger of too much tweeting

I've written in the past about how useful Twitter can be as a news tool as well as a social networking tool. However it also has the potential to cause all kinds of issues.

The tragic case of the death of former boxer Mike Tyson's young daughter is a case in point.

Early this morning I first got a tweet saying that four-year-old Exodus Tyson had died after an accident with a treadmill cord. On first look it passed the 'bullshit' detector - it appeared to be from a fairly reputable organisation and a second tweet from the same source referenced a major news provider.

It also built on the story we ran yesterday afternoon about the initial accident, so was definitely worthy of further investigation.

Within seconds this information was being retweeted all over the place. People were essentially passing on the information without taking a second to try and verify it.

I literally couldn't read the tweets fast enough.

In this case, verification against the source proved impossible. There was nothing on the news provider's website and the only information was coming from people retweeting the original information.

Then people started tweeting their condolences, essentially mini statements of fact that the little girl had died - even though at this point there was not a single piece of evidence that was the case.

A little while later another statement appeared on a random website, this time from a 'hospital insider' stating the little girl had died at around midnight. Again, the link to this website was retweeted and passed on as fact despite there being not a single piece of corrobarating information.

People even started to build on the existing tweets with their own information, including one particularly sick effort which stated as fact the little girl had been strangled by her big brother.

It then got weirder.

The original source for the story deleted their initial tweet which started the whole thing off, instead choosing to leave a tweet which put the blame at the door of the major news provider it was continuing to reference in error.

At that point the only credible conclusion to make was that someone was playing a particularly callous game and didn't have any real information.

And then, it appears, that the little girl actually did die.

Okay, some of you may say that it turned out to be true - but I believe this was more of a coincidence than anything else. It was well known Exodus was in intenstive care and deeply ill and therefore it wasn't a huge jump for people to believe she actually could be dead.

The same happened last week when reports of actor Patrick Swayze's death were promoted without verification.

The latest information I have seems to indicate the tragic death occured around 11.45am when she was taken off life support, casting further doubt as to the veracity of the original reports.

My belief is that Twitter can give a real competitive advantage in the cut-throat world of the media. But it also has the ability to be abused - in this case mostly unwillingly by people just wanting to pass on prayer messages and their positive thoughts.

So next time you see some breaking information on Twitter, take a few seconds to verify it before passing it on - you may be surprised at the results when you do.