Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms have the great ability to release information quickly and efficiently to a public that may not have been aware otherwise. However, it can also have detrimental effects when false information is released to the masses. Unfortunately, there is little policing of these media outlets available that would be able to verify information before it is released to the public by people who may not have the same moral standards as traditional journalists, or no morals at all.
For instance, when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012, a hedge fund analyst named Shashank Tripathia Tweeted, “BREAKING: Confirmed flooding on NYSE. The trading floor is flooded under more than 3 feet of water.” The Tweet has repeated hundreds of times and it was even reported on by reputable news sources such as CNN and the Weather Channel. Obviously, these news sources would not have repeated the false information had they done their due diligence to the public and contacted the source instead of worrying about being the first to report it on their own media platforms. Tripathia’s actions created the question of whether an individual could be prosecuted for using social media to make false claims during a crisis for the purpose of inciting further panic.
Social media also has the ability to pull at our heartstrings and make us question our world. In January of this year, a Twitter user known as @JustKuthi posted a 70 Tweet story about her “friend,” Kamo. Her first Tweet began with, “Story time…” In her story, Kamo was beaten and raped in a South African town before dying at the hospital from her injuries. An outpouring of sympathy from all over the world was the response to her story. Obviously, the respondents did not realize that the Tweets were not real. After the Tweets went viral, even the media was taken in and South Africa’s Star newspaper ran the story of Kamo without fact checking it first. The next day, they issued a retraction and tracked down the author of the Tweets, an 18-year-old girl from a northern South Africa town.
The young woman admitted that the story was false when a reporter contacted her to verify the Tweets. She explained that the story was not based on truth, but based on a real fear that women in her community face on a daily basis. Although the story had been revealed as false, it did spark a real world acknowledgment of the perils that women in South Africa face.
The South African Department for Woman Tweeted, "Violence against women and children is real. Khuthi's story may be fake, but in reality, there are many Kamos out there." The story brought awareness to an issue faced by many women, and by those who can help to create a change in the community.
The internet is a minefield of fake profiles, false information, and anonymous taunting. Another world, where the truth is at risk of being lost behind a veil of anonymity. Some people simply do not think about their online activities as something that can affect the offline reality of themselves and others. In the case of @JustKuthi, an innocent story written by a bright young woman drew the eyes of the world and resulted in an awareness that had not been there before, while Shashank Tripathia’s actions inspired fear. The connection made between these two stories is that neither was fact-checked before being accepted as truth. Stories like these have brought to light the burden of real journalistic reporting, to find the truth before relaying a story to the world.
Social media these days have been all but taken as fact without a source. In this online age, if we are to be well-informed citizens of the world, fact-checking is a responsibility placed upon all of us, not just the media.
