Legal Marketing & PR

Twitter: You Can't Always Trust What You Want

By Larry Bodine, Esq.

As marketers, for the last 9 days we've all been transfixed by the protests in Tehran, made accessible by Twitter messages leading to online videos. It's been dubbed the first protest movement enabled by technology. But the New York Times notes that you can't always trust what you read on Twitter.

This undsescores the doubts raised in my article  Twitter Not Effective for Law Firm Marketing. He's an excerpt from the Times:

Buyer Beware. Nothing on Twitter has been verified. While users can learn from experience to trust a certain Twitter account, it is still a matter of trust. And just as Twitter has helped get out first-hand reports from Tehran, it has also spread inaccurate information, perhaps even disinformation. An article published by the Web site True/Slant highlighted some of the biggest errors on Twitter that were quickly repeated and amplified by bloggers: that three million protested in Tehran last weekend (more like a few hundred thousand); that the opposition candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi was under house arrest (he was being watched); that the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid last Saturday (not so).

Watch Your Back. Not only is it hard to be sure that what appears on Twitter is accurate, but some Twitterers may even be trying to trick you. Like Rick's Café, Twitter is thick with discussion of who is really an informant or agent provocateur. One longstanding pro-Moussavi Twitter account, mousavi1388, which has grown to 16,000 followers, recently tweeted, 'WARNING: http://www.mirhoseyn.ir/ & http://www.mirhoseyn.com/ are fake, DONT join. ... #IranElection11:02 AM Jun 16th from web.' The implication was that government agents had created those accounts to mislead the public. ABCNews.com announced that Twitter users who said they were repeating ('retweeting') the posts from its reporter, Jim Sciutto, had been fabricating the material to make Mr. Sciutto seem to be backing the government. 'I became an unwitting victim,' he wrote.

Twitter Is Self-Correcting but a Misleading Gauge. For all the democratic traits of Twitter, not all users are equal. A popular, trusted user matters more and, as shown above, can expose others who are suspected of being fakers. In that way, Twitter is a community, with leaders and cliques. Of course, Twitter is a certain kind of community — technology-loving, generally affluent and Western-tilting. In that way, Twitter is a very poor tool for judging popular sentiment in Iran and trying to assess who won the presidential election. Mr. Ahmadinejad, who presumably has some supporters somewhere in Iran, is losing in a North Korean-style landslide on Twitter.

Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on June 22, 2009 (boomark / email).