Do You Trust Twitter?

“In one set of experiments, just published in a paper ominously entitled A little bird told me, so I didn’t believe it: Twitter, credibility, and issue perceptions, survey respondents were asked to rate the credibility of the same news story as delivered by a handful of sources, including the Twitter feed of the New York Times and the homepage of the same newspaper. Twitter came in dead last in terms of believability, behind even the same story linked from a completely random and anonymous blog. And this, mind you, was a tweet from the Times’s own Twitter account.”