The past few days have been equally frightening and fascinating, watching the London riots unfold. As has become common practice with breaking news events such as this, I’ve been primarily glued to Twitter for a lot of information, but have been careful in trying to verify anything with established media outlets. The BBC, Sky, Telegraph and Guardian all have excellent live coverage.
There have been a few news pieces citing the use of Twitter as a tool for helping the rioters organise themselves. This PR Week piece refers, perhaps unsurprisingly, to Daily Mail stories. I’m struggling to find many more, but have easily found stories like this covering the good uses for Twitter, to aid the clear up and help to identify the criminals, as well as the situation being used as an excuse to simply evangelise Twitter in general.
From my perspective I’m more interested in trying to make sense of conflicting reports and rumours flying around Twitter, making it very difficult to decide what to believe from what I’m reading. Is my route home safe, for example?
It will be interesting to see if what we learn from the use of social media during these kinds of events can be used to improve the system. Could there be a way to rank tweets based on their likely accuracy? Perhaps by taking into account the tweeter’s profile, whether they have included an image, verified their location etc. Perhaps users could even be up/down voted in terms or reliability?
Let us know what you think...
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