Telling the news on Twitter is different than telling the news in a magazine or newspaper. I realize journalists have a difficult job these days. The way mistakes are made and disseminated and the way they are corrected, is utterly different on Twitter than at a magazine like Wired or a newspaper like the New York Times. This places unfamiliar demands on journalists and novel demands on consumers of news. And the bigger burden is on the consumers, which I imagine makes the journalists especially cross. Because if we consumers want to have a real-time account of events–and we do, it really makes us a better informed citizenry–we have to understand how to deal better with ambiguity.

Consumers don’t just have to be “skeptical” or “critical thinkers” of breaking information: but they themselves have to operate as do journalists, by e.g., waiting for at least two independent sources as confirmation, and even then realize a piece of news only has some higher probability of being true. Tweets about older events have a lower threshold for warrant than breaking news, for obvious reasons. The price of timeliness is eternal vigilance.

I can understand the temptation to want to edit some (perceived) egregious fallacy you accidentally helped perpetuate, but that’s not how things work on Twitter. Delete the tweet, tweet a correction, or write an elaborate apology on your blog. It will harm your reputation to make a careless error, but on the other hand the audience should know to expect corrections when who-they-follow switch to the breaking-news game. And the audience wants breaking news, warts and all.

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Nick Kallen, who was a platform engineer at Twitter, wrote a good technical and philosophical response to Mat Honan’s request for a Twitter edit button. I still think Mat’s idea has merit but Kallen deftly explains why it’s beyond non-trivial.

This quote, about “telling news on Twitter”, though, is where Kallen reaches too far, irresponsibly so. It reads like Frankenstein promising his creation really is the key to eternal life, plus he’s great with kids, probably.

Kallen casually tosses out that a fire hose of real-time news makes for “a better informed citizenry” with absolutely nothing resembling a fact to back this claim up. I’m certainly unaware of anything that suggests the rush of breaking news equates to better democracy. In fact, everyone I know who seriously studies how breaking news affects news comprehension hypothesizes the end result is a net loss.

The fact is, we don’t yet know whether, as Kallen claims, “a real time account of events” actually does make for better citizens (and democracies) and probably won’t for some time. I suspect, though, that the proliferation of “slow news”1 we’ve seen as a response to the Chinese water torture of news-like updates is an indication that our fellow citizens yearn for, and deserve, better. And, let’s not forget, those stodgy old newspapers often still manage to tell the story best.

Kallen also suggests part of the solution is to shift the cognitive burden of figuring out fact from fiction back to readers2, that ambiguity and eternal vigilance are the prices we pay for an 86400000 millisecond news cycle. Call me old school, but I preferred when a journalist was someone we could trust to get it first, but first, get it right , instead of simply blasting out what any mope could hear coming across the police scanner.

I’ll note that I’m not laying the blame for the problems of breaking news at Twitter’s feet. These problems really aren’t new, they were with us long before Noah Glass wrote Twitter’s first Rails controller. In fact, I’d suggest that Twitter is perhaps uniquely suited to help solve these problems, beyond just an edit button, by putting all that Big Data to use sorting fact from rumor. Being the heart through which so much of the world beats has got to be useful for something more than telling me the kids still like Justin Bieber.

I’m no luddite and, perhaps surprisingly to my friends who work there, still have love in my heart for Twitter. I want to believe they can crack the secret to helping me know – really know, not just thumb through – the world I live in. Even if it’s not an edit button, I want to believe they’re trying.

By “slow news” I’ll (begrudgingly) include both the algorithmic summarizers that seek to distill the news of the day by Hadooping a never-ending supply of reverse pyramid wire copy and (more optimistically) the human touches of sites like The Brief or Evening Edition. And, yes, I had a hand in the genesis of Evening Edition so there lies my bias. ↩︎

A, perhaps fussy, stylistic point: I truly loathe the word “consumer”, particularly as it’s applied to what we once referred to as “readers”. The word conjures a gaping maw, shoveling in the byproduct of some faceless corporation, barely stopping to chew, let alone think, and its overuse by the wunderkinds of new new media betrays a certain intention, does it not? ↩︎