Social Media Telephone

Ever play the game, Telephone, growing up? The game where a message would start on one end and make its way through a line of kids before it reached the other end…

The message was never the same as it passed through everybody, was it?

I can’t help but see some parallels with everybody connecting to everybody on-line. Messages may start from trusted sources, but there is just something about taking a message and making it our own that leads to inaccuracies…

Let’s take something simple, like the H1N1 strand of the flu that’s going around. Two days ago, I could care less about the subject. I wasn’t following it in the news and I wasn’t reading about it on-line. I chose to put my head down and hope the C-Unit made it through this winter sans swine flu, because why worry about things I have no control over… Then my daughter comes down with “flu like symptoms” yesterday and I want to go to the internets for information. Here’s what I find:

(Update: My daughter seems to be battling through her bout with the swine just fine, knock on wood…)

National Emergency

The President declared a National Emergency last Friday, where was I when that happened, and I’m initially alarmed by this fact. Once I am able to do some simple fact finding, I understand that it was mainly to prepare the country for the possibility of an epidemic and is not tied to a current case count. Good news, we have foresight. Initial Source = Twitter Search. Trusted Source = CNN.com

my thoughts These two results matched up, and I’m sure that most of the time this is the case in social media. Rational explanations are pushed out by reputable sources and repeated throughout the network. But what happens when it gets a little muddier?

How Many People Have it?

This is where it gets sticky all of a sudden. You have one trusted source, the CDC, reporting on H1N1 cases by region. You have another trusted source, MSNBC, saying that the quick tests are not accurate. And another trusted source, CBS News, stating that the number of H1N1 cases have been drastically overstated.

my thoughts Nice, right? There is conflicting information coming from trusted sources, so which do you believe? At the moment, Twitter Search seems to show that people are spreading the CBS News message. Is that the whole story, though? It may be, but I’m concerned that the message also may be getting twisted as it is passed around.

Don’t even get me started on whether or not my kids should get the vaccine…

Valid Information

In any network, trusted information is more valuable then untrusted information. However, that logic flies in the face of social proof. If everybody is tweeting the same message, at what point does that message become trusted? That’s what I’m interested in, right now… What’s funny is that a friend of mine was trying to explain this very phenomenon to me months ago, and I didn’t understand what he meant. Of course the truth will rise to the top in all scenarios, right?

I get it now, Miguel. :)

What Do You Think?

Is accurate information being spread around “the network” at all times already? Does the truth always rise to the top? Can we trust social networks for valid information. Or are we all just playing a giant game of telephone? Let me know what you think in the comments below.