As you know, I have a Chinese version twitter-- weibo account and I use it very often to get the timely news which happens in China. And nowadays, I find that it is more and more difficult for me to distinguish whether the information which is disclosed from twitter is true or false. From my point of view, the credibility of information from weibo as well as other social media is a big problem which needs to be concerned carefully.
There are several reasons may cause the inaccuracy of information from weibo. First of all, the post person just wants to fake a breaking pseudo event and makes it spread widely so that his/her account could be famous. Besides, hackers may steal famous person's/organization's account and pretend ro be the famous person/organization himself/herself/itself to post fake news.
There is an example which happened in weibo last year. At that time, a Chinese famous actress broke her marriage and the reason for her divorce was a kind of mystery which most entertainment media wanted to know. Suddenly, a message was posted out from her ex-husband's weibo in which the man recognized the reason of their divorce was his betray and he claimed he had loved another actress. However, one day later, another message was posted from this weibo account and claimed the last post was wrote by a hacker who stole his account. Actually it is difficult to figure out whether the former message was sent by hacker or the ex-husband himself. Till now, we still don’t know the real reason for their divorce…
Another reason for the inaccuracy of information from weibo is that the post person himself/herself also don’t know the real condition. For example, the timeliness is very important for a reporter to post a message on weibo for breaking news. He may not get enough information to dig out the whole thing or check with different sources. Or he cannot write enough details with the 140 letters limit.
So, for us readers, we need to concern the information carefully before we retweet it.
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