The Downside of Social Media

I am taking a break from politics this week to take a look at something that popped into my head a few days ago, and before you ask, yes I am fine.

Now, I enjoy modern communications and social media, Facebook, Twitter, 24 hour news. They provide numerous advantages, including ease of communication and the rapid transmission of information, which is certainly useful when you’re trying to organise something, such as the clean-up effort after last summer’s riots, or trying to warn people about something.  But I do wonder whether such a speedy dissemination of information cannot sometimes be a bad thing.

Take the rumour this week that part of the Bakerloo line had collapsed. Someone tweeted it and – to borrow a line from Terry Pratchett – the rumour had got around the world, or at least Twitter, before the truth had got its boots on. Whatever Transport for London said about how it hadn’t happened and they were sending people to check etc, etc,  the rumour still held sway because more people had heard it than had heard the truth. It had split off and spread like some sort of virus.

There is also another bigger problem. Under normal circumstances TFL would have assessed the situation, sent in some inspectors to take a peek and figure out what was going on, then released a statement to the tune of “nothing happened. Just a misunderstanding.” But with the news already going around Twitter at the speed of gossip, they had to make a statement to quash the rumours without being in full possession of the facts. As it is, they were correct, but if they hadn’t been, if they had then had to release a contradictory story, they would have looked like a bunch of incompetent fools.

Another example would be the hostage situation in the Tottenham Court Road yesterday. The press were reporting a guy with a bomb and hostages. Now while there were hostages they were released fairly quickly and far from being some sort of IRA dissident tooled up with Semtex what you had was a guy with a couple of gas canisters and a love of tossing filing cabinets out of windows.  Dangerous in and of itself, but hardly the plot of a Die Hard sequel. But thanks to 24 hour news we got the first initial reports before the facts had actually emerged, leading in turn to panic.

This isn’t me saying that Twitter and breaking news aren’t useful. In times of crisis, when people need to know things immediately – so they can get themselves out of danger say – they are very useful indeed. But there are times when all they do is cause more chaos and upset. They are useful at times; I think we would all agree with that. But I do think people should be more careful about using them as their sole source of news, or taking what they say as the gospel truth. People do get things wrong sometimes!