twitter as a source of information

POSTED BY: 1kiki
UPDATED: Tuesday, September 2, 2025 07:21
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1KIKI

Saturday, January 16, 2016 9:22 AM

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-35263200

BBC Trending

The Twitter murder that never happened

It was a horrific crime that came to light in a series of impassioned tweets that gripped and appalled a nation. But it was all made up.

The story of a brutal rape and murder has provoked an outpouring of emotion from South African social media users, and was picked up by the press. It turned out to be completely fabricated, but has sparked a very real debate about rape in the country.

The clue - that many seem to have missed - was in the first tweet. "Story time..." it read.

It was posted on Sunday, and followed up over the next few hours with 70 numbered tweets, each reporting the next step in the grim tale. The tweets appeared to come from a little known Twitter user called @JustKuthi. She described her desperate search for her "friend" Kamo, who was found raped and injured at the end of the tale, before dying in hospital.

Not everybody saw the initial tweet, and other aspects of the story combined to make it appear real. Kamo has a Twitter profile, for example, that the author linked to at the end of the story.

Many on the network were so moved by the story which they took to be real, that they began tweeting messages of support and condolence. The author played along, retweeting the messages without clarifying that the story was made up. "I want to hug you so hard. I will pray for you. Please pull through," one of the posts read.

Government representatives at South Africa's Department of Women tweeted: "Please be counted in and help us fight violence against Women and Children. The story of #Kamo is heartbreaking."

"Kamo" has appeared almost 60,000 times on Twitter since Sunday, and a hashtag #RIPKamo has been used a further 7,000 times.

On Monday morning, South Africa's Star newspaper printed an account of the story as fact. "Tears for young Kamo as her young life is senselessly and brutally cut short," read the headline, now itself the subject of ridicule on Twitter. Sceptical social media users took issue with the paper's article, asking if they had verified the death, or been in touch with the author.

Later in the day the paper admitted that it - along with so many others - had been fooled. Its editor Kevin Ritchie told rival news organisation News24 that the the fake story highlighted important issues about "Journalism 101". He admitted that the story had not been checked with police before it ran. "We are red-faced and not happy with this at all," he said. "We are doing whatever we can to learn from this because this is not the journalism we pride ourselves on practicing.. It is a huge lesson for us and the industry."

In a seeming act of penance, the Star journalist who wrote the original piece started digging and posted a fresh article later on Monday. Walking readers through the investigation, she seemed to have got closer to the truth. @JustKuthi appears to be an 18-year-old woman from a town in northern South Africa, the paper reports. Explaining the inspiration for her tweets, the teenager told the Star: "It was just a story I read on the internet and it made me feel like I didn't want to live in South Africa anymore, so I made up my own story to show people how bad it is to live in South Africa... So many people responded, I just left it. I apologise for misleading everyone,"

She also said that a real friend of hers - also called Kamo - had died very recently, and that the Twitter account she referenced

1KIKI

Saturday, January 16, 2016 9:59 AM

Now on to a much maligned source Zero Hedge.

This was the story they reported:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-06/pray-us-libya-issues-cry-help
-isis-advances-oil-fields

"Pray For Us": Libya Issues "Cry For Help" As ISIS Advances On Oil Fields

“We are helpless and not being able to do anything against this deliberate destruction to the oil installations. NOC urges all faithful and honorable people of this homeland to hurry to rescue what is left from our resources before it is too late.”

That’s from Libya’s National Oil Corp and as you might have guessed, it references the seizure of state oil assets by Islamic State, whose influence in the country has grown over the past year amid the power vacuum the West created by engineering the demise of Moammar Qaddafi.

The latest attacks occurred in Es Sider, a large oil port that’s been closed for at least a year.

Seven guards were killed on Monday in suicide bombings while two more lost their lives on Tuesday as ISIS attacked checkpoints some 20 miles from the port. "Es Sider and Ras Lanuf, Libya's biggest oil ports, have been closed since December 2014," Reuters notes. "They are located between the city of Sirte, which is controlled by Islamic State, and the eastern city of Benghazi."

ISIS also set fire to oil tanks holding hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude. "Four tanks in Es Sider caught fire on Tuesday, and a fifth one in Ras Lanuf the day before," Ali al-Hassi, a spokesman for the the Petroleum Facilities Guard told Bloomberg over the phone.

(a fire at Ras Lanuf)

(a smoking storage tank in Es Sider)

Ludovico Carlino, senior analyst at IHS Country Risk says the attacks are “likely diversionary operations” during Islamic State’s takeover of the town of Bin Jawad, a seizure that may enable the group to expand and connect “its controlled territory around Sirte to the ‘oil crescent.’”

Islamic State is pushing east from Sirte in an effort to seize control of the country's oil infrastructure, much as the group has done in Syria and Iraq. As Middle East Eye wrote last summer, "the desert region to the south of the oil ports has been strategically cleared in a series of attacks by IS militants on security personnel and oil fields, where employees have been killed and kidnapped, and vehicles and equipment seized."

“I expect they will try and take Sidra and Ras Lanuf and the oil fields on the west side of the oil crescent,” one oil worker said. “There are few people left to protect the oil fields apart from local security from isolated towns.”

Efforts to protect Libya's oil are complicated immeasurably by the fractious (and that's putting it nicely) political environment.

In short: the country is a modern day Wild West and a strong central government is now a distant memory. This makes administering the country's resources nearly impossible. Oil production is now just a quarter of what it was under Qaddafi. Essentially, both of Libya's two governments have what they call a National Oil Corp. The eastern NOC is run by the exiled government in Tobruk (which is internationally recognized), where the House of Representatives was exiled in 2014 after elections produced an outcome that wasn't agreeable to Islamist elements in Tripoli.

Unfortunately, large foreign oil companies won't work with Tobruk's NOC which sets up the following ridiculous scenario: the internationally recognized government in Tobruk has an NOC no one wants to work with, while Tripoli's NOC (which foreign oil companies will do business with) is run by a government that the world doesn't deem legitimate.

To top it all off, there's every reason to believe that neither

SIGNYM

Saturday, January 16, 2016 8:43 PM

Couple of comments:

TO: OBAMA, CAMERON, SARKOZE
RE: ON THE CURRENT STATE OF DYSFUNCTION IN LIBYA (AND SYRIA)
MESSAGE: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

And, if you can believe it, that dick Cameron is STILL trying to justify bombing Libya! My god, why they don't just hang him at the Tower Gate I'll never understand. Blair too.

David Cameron: why bombing Libya wasn’t a mistake
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2015/12/david-cameron-why-bombing-libya-w
asnt-a-mistake/

SHEESH!

TO: KPO
RE: SOURCES
MESSAGE: Twitter is full of misinformation. Even when the information has been geo-located and vetted (bellingcrap) it is what I would call "insufficient", as they've been shown to be wrong with the so-called Assad-Sarin gas attack. Immediately afterwards, I recall posting (more than once) that shells, residues, faked pictures (found on Twitter), and interviews also contain valuable information.

Other sources which look disreputable may have bona-fide information. You need SOME kind of algorithm by which to parse the information that you're reading. That includes the known biases and past reliability of the source, OTHER kinds of information which may undercut or bolster the information being presented (missing information), other sources, "Why now?", "Cui bono?", and logical consistency with past proven events. You may be left in a situation where you can't come up with a decision on what's going on. That's OK. It's better to be a wise reader than be stampeded into rash action by a government-sponsored media blitz, as has happened far too many times in the past decade or so.

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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

AURAPTOR

Sunday, January 17, 2016 12:27 AM

This pretty much can apply to any source of information.

"Don't believe anything you read on [the Neal Boortz] web page or, for that matter, anything you hear on The Neal Boortz Show unless it is consistent with what you already know to be true, or unless you have taken the time to research the matter to prove its accuracy to your own satisfaction."

SIGNYM

Sunday, January 17, 2016 5:25 AM

You'd be surprised how many people don't research their own- or others' - information. heck, RAPPY, I've researched YOURS, especially the ones on climate shift which seemed to have some basis in science. I learned a lot!

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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

1KIKI

Monday, January 18, 2016 12:24 AM

So, twitter isn't a reliable source of information, and Zero Hedge can have solid stories. What does Facebook show?

http://www.rdmag.com/articles/2016/01/facebook-users-create-informatio
n-echo-chamber-study-says?et_cid=5039654&et_rid=366206770&type=headline

Facebook Users Create Information Echo Chamber, Study Says

The world wide web and social media have opened up a swath of avenues for information creation and consumption. But are people really opening themselves up to divergent information sources?

A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Italian and U.S. researchers claims that despite the wide availability of information, users—as with other forms of media—surround themselves with sources that align with and bolster their personal beliefs, creating an information echo chamber.

“Using a massive quantitative analysis of Facebook, we show that information related to distinctive narratives—conspiracy theories and scientific news—generates homogenous and polarized communities having similar information consumption patterns,” the researchers write.

The study was produced by researchers from Boston Univ., Sapienza Univ., and the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca.

Using data derived from the Facebook Graph application program interface, the researchers collected information from 67 public pages, 32 about conspiracy theories and 35 about science news. A second dataset was composed of two troll pages, which intentionally spread “sarcastic false information” around the Web. All the posts and subsequent user interactions—between 2010 and 2014—were downloaded and fed into an analysis software.

“Our findings show that users mostly tend to select and share content related to a specific narrative and to ignore the rest,” they write. “In particular, we show that social homogeneity is the primary driver of content diffusion, and one frequent result is the formation of homogenous, polarized clusters.”

The researchers believe such behaviors can explain phenomenon like the suspicion surrounding Jade Helm 15, among other stories with misinformation.

The spread of misinformation online is becoming so pervasive that the World Economic Forum listed it as one of their global risks to society in 2013, alongside terrorism and cyberattacks.

According to the researchers, this increasing trend has prompted companies like Google and Facebook to look into ways to rank the trustworthiness of stories and content. “This issue is controversial, however, because it raises fears that the free circulation of content may be threatened and that the proposed algorithms may not be accurate of effective,” the researchers write. “Often conspiracists will denounce attempts to debunk false information as acts of misinformation.”

SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.

1KIKI

Monday, January 18, 2016 12:47 AM

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the-sprea
d-of-ignorance

The man who studies the spread of ignorance

How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon

By Georgina Kenyon
6 January 2016

In 1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public. Called the Smoking and Health Proposal, and written a decade earlier by the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter “anti-cigarette forces”.

In one of the paper’s most revealing sections, it looks at how to market cigarettes to the mass public: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

This revelation piqued the interest of Robert Proctor, a science historian from Stanford University, who started delving into the practices of tobacco firms and how they had spread confusion about whether smoking caused cancer.

Proctor had found that the cigarette industry did not want consumers to know the harms of its product, and it spent billions obscuring the facts of the health effects of smoking. This search led him to create a word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology.

-> Agnotology is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour

It comes from agnosis, the neoclassical Greek word for ignorance or ‘not knowing’, and ontology, the branch of metaphysics which deals with the nature of being. Agnotology is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour.

“I was exploring how powerful industries could promote ignorance to sell their wares. Ignorance is power… and agnotology is about the deliberate creation of ignorance.

“In looking into agnotology, I discovered the secret world of classified science, and thought historians should be giving this more attention.”

The 1969 memo and the tactics used by the tobacco industry became the perfect example of agnotology, Proctor says. “Ignorance is ... also a political ploy, a deliberate creation by powerful agents who want you ‘not to know’.”

To help him in his search, Proctor enlisted the help of UC Berkeley linguist Iain Boal, and together they came up with the term – the neologism was coined in 1995, although much of Proctor’s analysis of the phenomenon had occurred in the previous decades.

Balancing act

Agnotology is as important today as it was back when Proctor studied the tobacco industry’s obfuscation of facts about cancer and smoking. For example, politically motivated doubt was sown over US President Barack Obama’s nationality for many months by opponents until he revealed his birth certificate in 2011. In another case, some political commentators in Australia attempted to stoke panic by likening the country’s credit rating to that of Greece, despite readily available public information from ratings agencies showing the two economies are very different.

Proctor explains that ignorance can often be propagated under the guise of balanced debate. ('fair and balanced', anyone?) For example, the common idea that there will always be two opposing views does not always result in a rational conclusion. This was behind how tobacco firms used science to make their products look harmless, and is used today by climate change deniers to argue against the scientific evidence.

“This ‘balance routine’ has allowed the cigarette men, or climate deniers today, to claim that there are two sides to every story, that ‘experts disagree’ – creating a false picture of the truth, hence ignorance.”

For example, says Proctor, many of the studies linking carcinogens in tobacco were conducted in mice initially, and the tobac

SIGNYM

Monday, January 18, 2016 1:03 AM

Agnatolgy, the process of turning knowledge into ignorance through the introduction of doubt? Another example (besides oil and tobacco companies) _ Microsoft.

In the old days, whenever some young upstart company introduced a hot new operating system or application, in addition to threatening PC-vendors with retaliatory pricing (monopolistic behavior) and introducing code with the sole purpose of producing error messages when the competitors product and MS product were run together, Microsoft would try to kill the product in the public mind by introducing ....

.... the FUD - factor.

What is the FUD factor, you might ask?

Fear
Uncertainty
Doubt

Oh, and they also introduced "vaporware" ... the great new product just around the corner, introduced about the time a competitor's product came on the market ... which never appeared.

NEVER underestimate the interests of business to screw you over. Government too, only we call them candidates.

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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

SIGNYM

Monday, January 18, 2016 10:19 PM

Anyway, KIKI, I appreciate your posts about the relative reliability of various sources, and their cognitive effects on their users. I hope you find more.

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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

KPO

Tuesday, January 19, 2016 1:39 AM

Twitter as 'a source of information'?

You girls are just showing once again that you don't understand what twitter is.

Quote:
So, twitter isn't a reliable source of information, and Zero Hedge can have solid stories.

So twitter is bad, but you like Zero Hedge... What about Zero Hedge ON Twitter? You realise Zero Hedge has a twitter account right? - https://twitter.com/zerohedge

*1kiki's head explodes*

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