Children lie about brushing their teeth. Politicians stretch the truth in the heat of a campaign. Newspaper reporters have been caught lying, as have best-selling book authors, corporations, spouses and, of course, government officials.
And so have lots of people on
It might seem that lies on social networks have become as common as the truth. Fabrications and sham pictures spread via Twitter during Hurricane Sandy, as did propaganda during the presidential campaign.
But is it a cause for worry? Twitter, in its own way, has a self-correcting mechanism.
David Livingstone Smith, associate professor of philosophy at the University of New England in Biddeford, Maine, and author of the book, “Why We Lie,” said online resources like Twitter and
Facebook were actually helping define the truth more quickly than ever.
“In the past, confirmation as well as disconfirmation took a long time to verify,” he said. Now, just as information spreads quickly, inaccuracies are corrected with the same swiftness. There is also more accountability today, as a digital record can now be tied to the creator of falsehoods as they unfurl.
Where things have changed is in what we consider an egregious lie. “In electronic media, lying has become less serious. We seem to have a more cavalier attitude to the truth than we did a long time ago,” Smith said. “There's no longer a clear distinction between reality and fantasy because with social media, the distinction between news and entertainment has been so eroded, that this clear and important difference has been lost.”
As a result, Smith said, online truth-seekers – often journalists – do what they have always done offline: use their “morally basic responsibility” to ensure that people are telling the truth.
This happened during the storm when the website
BuzzFeed exposed a Twitter user who was deliberately spreading dangerous lies about hospital fires and floods. (He apologized and hasn't been heard from since.)
On The Atlantic magazine's site, Alexis C. Madrigal, a senior editor, set up a blog that went through images of the storm, determining which were real and which had been plucked from disaster movies, like “The Day After Tomorrow.”
Tumblr page called “Is Twitter Wrong?” collected and verified images and Twitter messages, too.
Still, the question many people keep asking is, isn't it Twitter's responsibility to ensure that the things shared on it aren't fabrications? In one simple word: No.
Even if the company could monitor every post – close to a billion every two days – is it Twitter's duty to decipher what is real and what is not? We don't expect bookstores and libraries to verify every word on the nonfiction shelves.
Twitter could offer better tools to help people identify canards. Madrigal, for example, used Google image search to find the origin of photos, relying on algorithms to help with the verification process. “The only way to compete with these falsehoods is to use the same tools to fight back,” he said in a phone interview.
Twitter could also help people who share accidental inaccuracies in tweets by giving people the ability to edit or mark a Twitter message as wrong.
Currently, trying to note that an earlier message is incorrect is like announcing something in a restaurant and then coming back a few hours later, when there are all new patrons inside, to say your earlier statement was wrong. Ineffective, to say the least.
As Smith said, there are often times that it's OK to lie, like telling your boss he is funny when he is not or complimenting a spouse's outfit when you really think it's hideous.
“But there is also a lot of surplus and dangerous deceit,” he said, “and that's something that we all have an obligation to try and prevent.”