Think tank or rumor mill

Social media sites like Twitter were able to show their importance and their real value during the attacks in Mumbaii last week. In situations like the terrorist attacks in Mumbaii conventional means of communications are hobbled and the confusion and disorder can cause normal sources of information to have a very limited effectiveness. As soon as the attacks began, masses of individuals in and out of Mumbai used twitter to communicate.

Many of these tweets were eyewitness accounts of what was happening in Mumbai, and much of the information used by such news organizations as CNN or MSNBC, stemmed from these sources. The utility of twitter was not limited simply to journalism. People sent tweets asking for help, explaining how someone could get to safety, or emploring people to go give blood at hospitals that were running dangerously short. Dina Mehta from CNN described how twitter was used to provide messages of solidarity and support. The high point of sites like twitter is in this; enabling the crowd to work together to provide a clear picture and to solve problems, similar to sites like wikipedia.

Of course twitter does not always live up to this ideal, and the reaction to the attacks in Mumbai showed the darker side of twitter as well. Quoted by CNN, Tim Mallon said "I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets." Relative anonymity and a type of crowd mentality often leads to extremely abusive tweets, and accuracy is often a casualty.

Twitter, and similar sites, can be a great tool for journalists, but cannot be safely relied on. It can provide great details and information, but because it can turn into just a rumor mill and the impossibility of checking a posts credentials, info garnered off sites like twitter must be supported by separate sources.