Beware of Fakes on Twitter!

Twitter, a free micro-blogging and social networking service that enables its users to send and read messages of up to 140 characters to their followers and people their following respectively, these messages are better known as tweets (Ahmad 2010). With 105,779,710 registered users, an estimate of 300 000 people signing up everyday (The Huffington Post 2010), Twitter is known as a popular source of information and communication that is globalizing the world. However, Twitter.com is not a reliable source of information.

The Twitter bird, one of Twitter.com's popular logos

(image source: http://seevirtual.wordpress.com/ )

Hackers and impersonators are causing a rapid decline in Twitter’s credibility. On Twitter, anyone can sign up with his or her desired username and profile picture to portray someone else, or hack into someone’s account and pretend to be that person. For example, Britney Spear’s twitter account was hacked into 3 times, and one of it portrayed her as worshiper of the Devil (Leyden 2009). These actions are possible because of Twitter’s poor verification system, as it is impossible for Twitter’s relatively small staff to verify each and every user (Owen 2009).

A print screen of Britney's hacked Twitter account. The Tweet that the

hacker posted up was 'I give myself to Lucifer every day for it to arrive

as quickly as possible. Glory to Satan!'

(image source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/12/spears_twitter_hack/)

These actions can be seen as a parody or a threat to many, because if identity stealers are serious about ruining one’s reputation, they can go to the extend of addressing personal issues to cause extreme humiliation and distress. However, parodies can be a healthy way of poking fun, but only if it does not cross the boundaries of impersonation (Owen 2009).

hackers and impersonators imposes a threat

(image source: http://perso.wanadoo.es/dbo_castilla/varios/varios-ingles.html)

Twitter’s unreliable source of information can also affect journalism. For instance, an impersonator of the Dalai Lama opened a Twitter account portraying to be the Holy Dalai Lama. When several journalists and bloggers found out, they immediately reported the the Dalai Lama’s debut, only to correct their reports when it was revealed to be fake. This incident. This situation draws attention to journalist’s respect for the integrity of information. "News is very different now and you want to get the news out there as quickly as you can," she said. "And though it's no excuse, there aren't people in the middle of the night standing by their phones to verify a story.," quoted by Lidja Davis, regular writer for ReadWriteWeb (Owen 2009).

An impersonator of the Dalai Lama

(image source: http://pondstonecommunications.wordpress.com/category/social-media/)

As Twitter and the trend of citizens journalism continues to rise, the importance of understanding how it works becomes more important. We should all be cautious and understand the lack of integrity of information that we find on Twitter because not only may the news be unreliable, but so are the user’s identities.




References:
Ahmad, A 2010, Is Twitter a useful tool for journalists?, Journal of Media Practice, Vol. 11, No.2, pp. 145 – 155.

Bosker, B 2010, Twitter User Statistics Revealed, The Huffington Post 30th April, as viewed 11 November 2010 < http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/14/twitter-user-statistics-r_n_537992.html >

Leyden, J 2009, Twitter fights celeb imposters with Verified Account scheme, The Register 8th June, as viewed 12th November 2010, < href="www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/12/spears_twitter_hack/">www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/12/spears_twitter_hack/ >.

Owens, S 2009, How Celebrity Imposters Hurt Twitter's Credibility, Media Shift 20th February, viewed 12 November 2010 < http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/02/how-celebrity-imposters-hurt-twitters-credibility051.html >