The constant stream of news and mild thought that is Twitter occasionally frustrates me. And ok, by “occasionally” I mean “on a daily basis.” If I read email forwards (I don’t get too many, and don’t read them when I do) I am sure I would feel the same way. Some people or organizations retweet (i.e. repost tweets with no commentary) or post news article headlines with no context. Getting content to go viral might be great for the original content producer, but can be terribly misleading for people a bit later down the content stream who might be trusting their Twitter friends to be accurate rather than provocative. I am thinking of, for instance, the to-do over the “OMG APPLE IS TRACKING YOU” news story that was a) not news and b) not really true in the way that people were taking it.
And yeah, I get that provocative and misleading statements are hardly original with Twitter.
But let me just ask that if you retweet/reblog/re-whatever something, and if it’s “not intended to be a factual statement” you might make a mention of that. I mean for newsy stuff. Not for articles from The Onion or similar. Otherwise, I will probably tweet the retraction/correction/investigative journalism rebuttal at you.