Social Media Spin

One trou­bling aspect of ‘cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists’ and the rela­tion­ship unknown and untested blog­gers have with respected online news jour­nals is that some­times these blog­gers sub­mit posts which have a detri­men­tal effect on busi­ness. This sit­u­a­tion has been seen over and over again. Last month for instance, a wrongly dated post about United Air­lines caused stock prices to plum­met 75%. Most recently in yet another false post about Steve Jobs’ health, Apple stock plum­meted upon news on iReport.com of Steve Jobs being rushed to the hos­pi­tal after a heart attack. Apple offi­cials quickly rejected the post as untrue, and the story has since been pulled from iReport.com, where it originated.

If the false post wasn’t enough of a pain for CNN (the owner of iRe­port), the SEC is now inves­ti­gat­ing the false claims about Jobs. Reg­is­tra­tion on iReport.com only requires a work­ing email address, but CNN is hand­ing over what infor­ma­tion they have about the author of the Steve Jobs post.

Twit­ter was abuzz with news of Steve Job’s heart attack, and many con­sid­ered the value of their Apple stock declin­ing in tweets to this pop­u­lar micro-​​blogging ser­vice. Anec­do­tally, I noted very few tweets relat­ing to the story being revealed as bogus once Apple rejected the claim. Much work is going in to cor­rect the rumor and spec­u­la­tion, but for Apple, the dam­age is ongoing. 

Who is ulti­mately respon­si­ble for ‘cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists’? If we, as blog­gers can post to main­stream media news sites, what obvi­ous sys­tem is in place to ensure the accu­racy of each post? Offline when I take my old clothes to a con­sign­ment shop for dona­tion, each item goes through a sim­ple inspec­tion to make sure they’re up to the stores qual­ity stan­dard. Cer­tainly online, when ‘cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists’ have the abil­ity to post news sto­ries which can erase mil­lions of dol­lars in mar­ket value, why isn’t there at least the most rudi­men­tary qual­ity stan­dard in place? The short answer is speed. News net­works are under increas­ing pres­sure to be the first to release an impor­tant news story, so they pre­fer to deal with pos­si­ble con­se­quences later rather than miss the oppor­tu­nity to be the first. I sub­mit that a sim­ple qual­ity check should be in place for all main­stream news sites, which requires first and last name, work­ing email address and no sub­mis­sions from a blocked IP address. Surely, there are sim­ple workarounds to these rudi­men­tary sub­mis­sion stan­dards, but also as sure they will likely elim­i­nate some of the mar­ket insta­bil­ity caused by the rumor mill.

What other sub­mis­sion stan­dards should online news jour­nals imple­ment to help ensure the accu­racy of sto­ries sub­mit­ted by ‘cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists’? I’d like to hear your views.