Twitter

The amount of reputation twitter is gaining for its role as a de facto news source is a bit absurd. The media (I'm looking at you CNN) are over glorifying twitter. They claim that twitter will herald a new era of citizen journalism but what they fail to realize is that these "journalisms" lack a critical aspect: credibility. How do we know that what these people are twittering are entirely true? The fact is that we don't. With big news corporations there are at least regulations that prevent these kind of faux news (no pun intended). Some may say that if the majority of the people are writing about it, it must be true, but then groups of people can coordinate to write something that is completely untrue or biased,l effectively making the story the majority; couple this with something that appeals to people's emotions (i.e. shocking photos, touching stories, etc.) and voila, you get people believing in it. My guess is that someday some organizations such as an internet forum will attempt to orchestrate something like this and end up duping the entire world. This kind of discredit to services such as twitter will actually be necessary. It's a bit unnerving how easy it is for us to believe information fed to us given the right circumstances.