http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/ by Peter Kafka Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:52:18 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-26881 » RT: The Sky is Falling! Twitter’s Trending Topics and Information Cascades » Cornell Info 2040 - Networks Tue, 20 Apr 2010 03:23:41 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-26881 [...] In today’s fast-paced, Internet-in-your-pocket world, it’s easy to get updates about what’s happening in the world in an instant. Over the last few years, Twitter has come to be one of the most popular outlets for this type of realtime information on the Internet. In April 2009, Twitter added a module to its front page called “Trending Topics,” where users can see what phrases and tags are the most popular at the moment [1]. This makes it possible for the average Tweeter to find topics that are beyond the scope of what the people they follow directly are talking about. Trending Topics range in nature from the inane (#NowPlaying, frequently used in tweets sharing what music a user is currently listening to) to the gossipy (Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, and other celebrity names) to the downright inexplicable (#doyouwantacookie - Trending Topic no. 7 at time of writing).Twitter occasionally becomes a vehicle for hot updates that get too far ahead of themselves - sometimes even literally. News of major earthquakes shows up on Twitter partway around the world before the seismic effects even reaches readers [2]. The recent deaths of stars Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Billy Mays all within three days of each other (June 25, 25, and 28, 2009, respectively) [3] also certainly got their fair share of attention on the ever-growing microblogging site.As you can imagine, however, the speed with which such news propagates leads to lots of false alarms. In the same flurry of celebrity death tweets of June 25, 2009, a new rumor quickly rose to the fore: that actor Jeff Goldblum was among the lost, having supposedly fallen to his death on a film set in New Zealand [4, 5]. Like Chicken Little, TMZ.com, the purported originator, spread the rumor through the community as countless retweets and repeats began to propagate throughout the Twitterverse. In January 2010, a small evacuation at Grand Central Station in Manhattan was picked up by the Twitter community, and within a matter of hours, users were (falsely) reporting an explosion, a fatality, the presence of SWAT teams on scene, and trains bound for the station were no longer stopping there [6].This kind of “sky-is-falling,” lemming mentality is a perfectly good example of how information cascades can manifest themselves on a global scale. In the near-realtime world of Twitter, where news is only as good as its timestamp is recent (and where users’ inclination to fact-check is so frequently and so remarkably overlooked), it may only take a handful of well-connected friends to instigate any matter of vicious rumors. The nature of how information propagates throughout the Twitter network makes it hard for the arbitrary user to determine if any of the signals (i.e., rumor tweets) he or she is receiving are legitimate and trustworthy on their own, or if they are merely retweets that don’t add any new information to the story in their own right. The short character limit of Twitter posts is a convenient excuse not to cite one’s sources, and thus many people reading such poorly-supported tidbits wouldn’t think twice about it. The retweet framework has improved since the community picked up the practice, which in theory should make it easier to trace a tweet back to its originator and determine if a signal is really present in the environment, but it is still possible to resend someone else’s tweet without crediting them, which can throw the diligent fact-checker off the trail.Oh, Twitter developers, how innocent and naïve your aspirations were back on that fateful April day. “Twitter teaches us… that search is so much more than a box and a button,” you told us [1]. “Trends are a compelling if rudimentary way to explore a collective global consciousness.” At least Twitter acknowledges the limitations of its Trending Topics feature, but one year later after its introduction, what can developers do to improve it? Surely there are some structural features that Twitter could put in place to help cut down on the number of false rumors that gain so much attention once they reach that cascade-inducing slot on the Top Ten Trending Topics.The problems I mention above might be addressable in the implementation of the Trending Topics module. In June 2009, Twitter announced a beta version of a new “Verified Accounts” program, which allows bona fide celebrities, public agencies, and so on to stamp their Twitter profiles with an accredited badge [7]. Twitter’s Trending Topics could incorporate some analytics to see whether gossipy topics originated from, or have been confirmed by, legitimate “verified” agencies that ought to have some expertise and insight on the particular topic at hand. Trending Topics might also consider including data on how quickly each topic spread over the last several hours (e.g., provide a graph with number of tweets per hour) to give an indication of whether a given tweet propagated in a panic. Finally, Twitter might use natural language processing to flag or highlight tweets that sound like they may include key words or phrases common of hoaxes and fear-mongering, thus attuning Twitter users to topics that they might want to think twice about before retweeting.It’s a big, bad world, and it’s a big, bad Twitterverse. Information cascades will still happen, but perhaps Twitter’s developers can help its users learn to recognize the signs of cascades and give us all some more insight into how little information it really takes to cause a big uproar.Sources:[1] http://blog.twitter.com/2009/04/twitter-search-for-everyone.html[2] http://twitter.com/USGSted[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_25_2009#2009_June_25[4] http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-...[5] http://screencrave.com/2009-06-25/report-jeff-goldblum-has-died/[6] http://news.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977993185[7] http://mashable.com/2009/06/11/twitter-verified-accounts-2/ Posted in Topics: Education, Technology These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...] [...] In today’s fast-paced, Internet-in-your-pocket world, it’s easy to get updates about what’s happening in the world in an instant. Over the last few years, Twitter has come to be one of the most popular outlets for this type of realtime information on the Internet. In April 2009, Twitter added a module to its front page called “Trending Topics,” where users can see what phrases and tags are the most popular at the moment [1]. This makes it possible for the average Tweeter to find topics that are beyond the scope of what the people they follow directly are talking about. Trending Topics range in nature from the inane (#NowPlaying, frequently used in tweets sharing what music a user is currently listening to) to the gossipy (Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, and other celebrity names) to the downright inexplicable (#doyouwantacookie – Trending Topic no. 7 at time of writing).Twitter occasionally becomes a vehicle for hot updates that get too far ahead of themselves – sometimes even literally. News of major earthquakes shows up on Twitter partway around the world before the seismic effects even reaches readers [2]. The recent deaths of stars Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Billy Mays all within three days of each other (June 25, 25, and 28, 2009, respectively) [3] also certainly got their fair share of attention on the ever-growing microblogging site.As you can imagine, however, the speed with which such news propagates leads to lots of false alarms. In the same flurry of celebrity death tweets of June 25, 2009, a new rumor quickly rose to the fore: that actor Jeff Goldblum was among the lost, having supposedly fallen to his death on a film set in New Zealand [4, 5]. Like Chicken Little, TMZ.com, the purported originator, spread the rumor through the community as countless retweets and repeats began to propagate throughout the Twitterverse. In January 2010, a small evacuation at Grand Central Station in Manhattan was picked up by the Twitter community, and within a matter of hours, users were (falsely) reporting an explosion, a fatality, the presence of SWAT teams on scene, and trains bound for the station were no longer stopping there [6].This kind of “sky-is-falling,” lemming mentality is a perfectly good example of how information cascades can manifest themselves on a global scale. In the near-realtime world of Twitter, where news is only as good as its timestamp is recent (and where users’ inclination to fact-check is so frequently and so remarkably overlooked), it may only take a handful of well-connected friends to instigate any matter of vicious rumors. The nature of how information propagates throughout the Twitter network makes it hard for the arbitrary user to determine if any of the signals (i.e., rumor tweets) he or she is receiving are legitimate and trustworthy on their own, or if they are merely retweets that don’t add any new information to the story in their own right. The short character limit of Twitter posts is a convenient excuse not to cite one’s sources, and thus many people reading such poorly-supported tidbits wouldn’t think twice about it. The retweet framework has improved since the community picked up the practice, which in theory should make it easier to trace a tweet back to its originator and determine if a signal is really present in the environment, but it is still possible to resend someone else’s tweet without crediting them, which can throw the diligent fact-checker off the trail.Oh, Twitter developers, how innocent and naïve your aspirations were back on that fateful April day. “Twitter teaches us… that search is so much more than a box and a button,” you told us [1]. “Trends are a compelling if rudimentary way to explore a collective global consciousness.” At least Twitter acknowledges the limitations of its Trending Topics feature, but one year later after its introduction, what can developers do to improve it? Surely there are some structural features that Twitter could put in place to help cut down on the number of false rumors that gain so much attention once they reach that cascade-inducing slot on the Top Ten Trending Topics.The problems I mention above might be addressable in the implementation of the Trending Topics module. In June 2009, Twitter announced a beta version of a new “Verified Accounts” program, which allows bona fide celebrities, public agencies, and so on to stamp their Twitter profiles with an accredited badge [7]. Twitter’s Trending Topics could incorporate some analytics to see whether gossipy topics originated from, or have been confirmed by, legitimate “verified” agencies that ought to have some expertise and insight on the particular topic at hand. Trending Topics might also consider including data on how quickly each topic spread over the last several hours (e.g., provide a graph with number of tweets per hour) to give an indication of whether a given tweet propagated in a panic. Finally, Twitter might use natural language processing to flag or highlight tweets that sound like they may include key words or phrases common of hoaxes and fear-mongering, thus attuning Twitter users to topics that they might want to think twice about before retweeting.It’s a big, bad world, and it’s a big, bad Twitterverse. Information cascades will still happen, but perhaps Twitter’s developers can help its users learn to recognize the signs of cascades and give us all some more insight into how little information it really takes to cause a big uproar.Sources:[1] http://blog.twitter.com/2009/04/twitter-search-for-everyone.html[2] http://twitter.com/USGSted[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_25_2009#2009_June_25[4] http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-…[5] http://screencrave.com/2009-06-25/report-jeff-goldblum-has-died/[6] http://news.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474977993185[7] http://mashable.com/2009/06/11/twitter-verified-accounts-2/ Posted in Topics: Education, Technology These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-10030 Week 3: Impact of audience-generated content | ALJ301 blog Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:47:31 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-10030 [...] spread news, the print media is still generally seen as a more trustworthy source of information compared to these platforms. The unreliability of Twitter can be seen in the numerous death hoaxes that have taken place on the [...] [...] spread news, the print media is still generally seen as a more trustworthy source of information compared to these platforms. The unreliability of Twitter can be seen in the numerous death hoaxes that have taken place on the [...]

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-10029 Week 3: Impact of audience-generated content | ALJ301 blog Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:37:55 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-10029 [...] spread news, the print media is still generally seen as a more trustworthy source of information compared to these platforms. Therefore, Quinn and Quinn-Allen are correct in stating that the print media’s role is to [...] [...] spread news, the print media is still generally seen as a more trustworthy source of information compared to these platforms. Therefore, Quinn and Quinn-Allen are correct in stating that the print media’s role is to [...]

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-7325 Twitter, el “ruido” y la credibilidad… : Wishful thinking… Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:06:09 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-7325 [...] Goldblum (”La mosca”, “Parque Jurásico”) había muerto en Nueva Zelanda explotó en Twitter. En apenas unos minutos era trending topic. En unas horas, todo el mundo lo daba por [...] [...] Goldblum (”La mosca”, “Parque Jurásico”) había muerto en Nueva Zelanda explotó en Twitter. En apenas unos minutos era trending topic. En unas horas, todo el mundo lo daba por [...]

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-7164 Jeff Goldblum Defies the Web, Denies His Death On Colbert Report [MediaMemo] | UpOff.com Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:25:24 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-7164 [...] the Colbert Report over the past few weeks, but last night was by far his best work. For starters, the Internet and Twitter declared him dead last [...] [...] the Colbert Report over the past few weeks, but last night was by far his best work. For starters, the Internet and Twitter declared him dead last [...]

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-7157 Jeff Goldblum Defies the Web, Denies His Death On Colbert Report | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:34:04 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-7157 [...] the Colbert Report over the past few weeks, but last night was by far his best work. For starters, the Internet and Twitter declared him dead last [...] [...] the Colbert Report over the past few weeks, but last night was by far his best work. For starters, the Internet and Twitter declared him dead last [...]

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-7106 The Great Michael Jackson Web Collapse Downgraded to “Stumble” [MediaMemo] | UpOff.com Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:59:33 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-7106 [...] previously noted that the Web is great at transmitting information quickly, though not always accurately. Same goes, apparently, for stories about the Web’s ability to transmit information quickly. [...] [...] previously noted that the Web is great at transmitting information quickly, though not always accurately. Same goes, apparently, for stories about the Web’s ability to transmit information quickly. [...]

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-7100 The Great Michael Jackson Web Collapse Downgraded to Stumble | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:03:43 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-7100 [...] previously noted that the Web is great at transmitting information quickly, though not always accurately. Same goes, apparently, for stories about the Web’s ability to transmit information [...] [...] previously noted that the Web is great at transmitting information quickly, though not always accurately. Same goes, apparently, for stories about the Web’s ability to transmit information [...]

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-7066 In death Michael Jackson gives life to media | iSawNEWS.com Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:27:17 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-7066 [...] On Friday, blogs were buzzing about the mystery around the controversial megastar’s sudden death and websites displayed photo montages showing it all - the signature moonwalk dance and his infamous dangling of his baby son over a balcony and everything in between. Others debated the merits of learning the news on microblogging site Twitter. [...] [...] On Friday, blogs were buzzing about the mystery around the controversial megastar’s sudden death and websites displayed photo montages showing it all – the signature moonwalk dance and his infamous dangling of his baby son over a balcony and everything in between. Others debated the merits of learning the news on microblogging site Twitter. [...]

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-7041 June Gordon Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:40:10 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-7041 The King of Pop! He will live on forever in our hearts. The King of Pop! He will live on forever in our hearts.

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-7002 1416?? » king of pop is dead???? Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:15:18 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-7002 [...] ?????????????????????????????????????????????MJ???????? ???????????MJ????????????????????tiwtter?????????????????? ???twitter????????????????????????????twitter?????????TMZ????????????????????????????????????“ bit.ly”???????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????twitter????????tmz???????????????????twitter??????????????????????cnn???????twitter? ???????????twitter????????????????????????????????????????? [...] [...] ?????????????????????????????????????????????MJ???????? ???????????MJ????????????????????tiwtter?????????????????? ???twitter????????????????????????????twitter?????????TMZ????????????????????????????????????“ bit.ly”???????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????twitter????????tmz???????????????????twitter??????????????????????cnn???????twitter? ???????????twitter????????????????????????????????????????? [...]

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-7001 Shared Items From Google Reader – June 26, 2009 at timlauer.org Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:00:33 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-7001 [...] Michael Jackson is Dead, Jeff Goldblum is Alive. Can Twitter Tell the Difference? [...] [...] Michael Jackson is Dead, Jeff Goldblum is Alive. Can Twitter Tell the Difference? [...]

]]> http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090626/michael-jackson-is-dead-jeff-goldblum-is-alive-can-twitter-tell-the-difference/comment-page-1/#comment-6996 Michael Jackson is Dead, Jeff Goldblum is Alive. Can Twitter Tell the Difference? - TechChuck Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:22:16 +0000 http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=8649#comment-6996 [...] the whole story on AllThingsD or try our ToolbarRelated stories from top sites:Twitter has a history of killing off features in [...] [...] the whole story on AllThingsD or try our ToolbarRelated stories from top sites:Twitter has a history of killing off features in [...]

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