Recently, Facebook pushed the “disputed news” tag into its universe. Although the feature isn’t available to all users yet, Fortune.com reports “Facebook says that stories flagged as fake by users will be reviewed by independent fact-checking organizations including Politifact and Snopes.com.”
I’m interested to see how this rolls out, how much people try to abuse it, whether or not Politifact and Snopes will be able to keep up with demand, if it actually helps the general public wade through truth and fiction and so on and so forth.
What I’m also interested in … is WHAT IS TWITTER DOING?!
Twitter’s failure to provide users with an edit button or a way to issue a correction that could ripple through and alert any of the people who saw it/retweeted it means false trolling comments and factually incorrect information can just float around out there or can be deleted without the ability to publicly recall that false info.
Here are the things I wish you could do on Twitter:
1. Edit a tweet – made a typo? GD IT YOU GOTTA START ALL OVER AGAIN. Just let us edit a tweet. Pleeeeaaaase.
2. Issue a correction notification - this would be helpful and important for news organizations, individual reporters and politicians, in particular. If, in the race to post information, you made a factual error, this feature would let you edit that tweet to be factually correct and notify those who engaged with the original tweet of the proper info.
3. Issue an apology – if in the heat of the moment you tweeted something unkind or shared something insensitive, it would be delightful to have the power to issue an apology to anyone who interacted with that tweet. Sometimes saying “sorry” is what you need to do.
Meanwhile, I continue to struggle with Twitter’s long-term vision and potential. After a rough year of high-profile exits and earning a reputation for being a hotbed of nastiness, I’m wondering where the company plans to go next and how it will address the ethical issues it faces.
I’m also wondering what to have for a snack, because I’m very hungry and my lunch was unsatisfactory.
