NDM Article 15: Jasmine Gardner: News travels fast in cyberspace but can we trust it?

The article states how news over social media spreads quite rapid making stories become viral in a matter of seconds e.g. Morgan Freeman dying three times: once on twitter and twice on Facebook. Another example being tigers were let loose during London 2011 riots and most recently David Moyes (ManU boss) was apparently sacked. These all were of course rumours and lies which was what inspired the article to be written. We cannot believe everything we read on the internet which is why King's College Lonodn are creating a project called Pheme which over the next 18 months will be a built web app that will determine the likeliness of a statement being true or false.

In the US a third of all adults under 30 are said to get their news from social media, with half of all Twitter users receiving their newsflashes in 140 characters. 

According to FastCompany, social media has overtaken porn consumption as the number one activity on the web. 

More significantly, a survey late last year by market researcher Populus showed that in Britain, Twitter is now an everyday news source for 55 per cent of opinion formers. In other words, a majority of influential people get their information from a potentially unreliable source.

I do agree that the article by Jasmine Gardner is correct, we do get news quite fast and it does spread quite fast especially due to twitter and not every piece of the news sent and spread around is going to be true. But I don't believe an app will be enough to prevent rumours from spreading. It'll most likely help in some way e.g. if Morgan Freeman tweeted a few mins before his fake death or after his fake death then it'll most likely pick that up and state the statement is a lie.

http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/jasmine-gardner-news-travels-fast-in-cyberspace-but-can-we-trust-it-9159845.html