Impostors hurt Twitter's Credibility

According to Simon Owens (2009) reported that Twitter,the famous social networking has been use by the celebrity to harm Twitter's credibility. Many celebrity such as Britney Spears, Kim Kardashian and the others actually created Twitter to communicate with their fans. However, some people tend to make celebrity's fake profile by giving the fake news made us cannot even know that it is really credible or not. Simon Owens( 2009) also reported that there is a fake account on Twitter of Dalai Lama which have 20,000 followers and he never tweet anything before and this had been complained and we finally know that it is a fake account. This give a serious problem to journalist and reporters to doubt with the credibility and might report the wrong information to people as Jeremy Porter (2009) stated that 70% of journalist use social networking to help them on reporting. This can be supported by the survey which found that 69 percent of respondents go to company websites to assist in their reporting, while 66 percent use blogs, 51 percent use Wikipedia-wow, 48 percent go to online videos-double wow, and 47 percent use Twitter and other microblogging services -would have guessed higher on this one(Jeremy Porter,2009). Other than that, Peter Sciretta (2009) also stated that this problem can give fake information to the media is a very serious case and he also suggested that this must be done by someone to stop the growing problems of celebrity impostors on twitter. Overall, I think that all these issues cannot be avoided but the only thing is to set regulation on Twitter to perform ethical publishing with credible news and information so that it will not give challenges to journalist to worry about the credibility to give out false information to the public and create misunderstanding.

References

Owen S, 2009, How Celebrity Imposters Hurt Twitter's Credibility, Mediashift, viewed 14 November 2010,

(http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2009/02/how-celebrity-imposters-hurt-twitters-credibility051.html)

Porter, J 2009, 70 Percent of Journalists Use Social Networks to Assist in Reporting, viewed 14 November 2010,

(http://blog.journalistics.com/2009/70-percent-of-journalists-use-social-networks-to-assist-in-reporting)

Sciretta P, 2009, The Growing Problem of Celebrity Imposters On Twitter, viewed 14 November 2010,

(http://www.slashfilm.com/the-growing-problem-of-celebrity-imposters-on-twitter)