twitter as a 'news source'

[inertianinja]

this post will be extremely nerdy.


so, apparently people twittered about the earthquake and the story spread via twitter hours before any major news source was able to put together a story.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080515/tc_pcworld/145923


so, i was thinking about twitter in this light...and i'm a lawyer, so naturally i can only think inside my own little world.

i was thinking about evidence rules - in particular the hearsay rule. in a nutshell, you can't introduce into evidence a statement that was made by someone outside of court because it wasn't made under oath and you can't confront them to see if they lied....

...but there are exceptions for situations where the circumstances under which the statement was made would give you some reassurance that the statement was the truth.

two of these are the "Excited Utterance" and "Present Sense Impression" which mean that if someone says something about what's going on ("Oh god, bob just shot that guy!" or "damn the sky is blue today") as it's happening, it's reliable because they said it before they would have had a chance to even think that they should lie about it.


so i was thinking that this concept applies to twitter. generally people tweet about things *while they're happening*....so they're essentially reporting news contemporaneously with the actual event and before there's any chance to think about what way to politically spin it, lie about it, etc.

if that makes any sense, it really does have the potential to be a good news source, free of the bullshit back-room spin decisions that otherwise plague the "news" we get.



whatchu think?


(if anyone's following me on twitter, you know i'm doing a felony trial right now...so that's why i'm thinking all legal-y)

[damnedeyez]

eh...blurting out something makes sense since it's speaking their thoughts before thinking them. The act of typing/writing gives the mind that split second to think things over a bit. Granted, not deep thought, but it's still more likely to be be slightly edited over a verbal outburst.

[ariastar]

I pity your client if you're an attorney. Meet Proper Punctuation.

Twitter can be a reliable news source depending on the type of news. If it's a major disaster, such as the earthquake, then yes. It's of a magnitude and severity that the people sending news can't cross-reference. If it's minor, local news, what's going on at a high school, etc., then it's easier to lie about.

[gonzooo]

I pity your client if you're an attorney. Meet Proper Punctuation.
Was this necessary?

[inertianinja]

Was this necessary?

No, he is right. I should write on the Internet in the same way that I write professionally, and above all to ariastar's satisfaction- especially when his/her punctuation is perfect.

[hellfighter]

Was this necessary?

Yeah, that attitude bummed me. Anyway, now your avatar is more enjoyable inertianinja!

[dolson]

I think what you're trying to say is that if Twitter had appeared like 7 years ago, more people would know and believe the truth about what happened on 9/11.

[geeksunny]

so, apparently people twittered about the earthquake and the story spread via twitter hours before any major news source was able to put together a story.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20080515/tc_pcworld/145923

When did this happen? Just recently? there's no year on that post except in the URL so I'm gonna assume it did.

Which is spooky because this exact same situation happaned about a year ago. There was an earthquake in Asia and everyone heard about it through twitter first, except most people didn't know what twitter was yet.

On some bizzare chance I was up late and couldn't sleep and started watching Chris Pirillo's live stream and they were discussing it in the chat room and he called people who felt the earthquake over there with skype and there was this huge discussion about how twitter is the future of news.