Social media is not ready to be a trusted source of news…

I get a lot of information everyday from Twitter and Facebook – stuff people have shared online… For the most part I find that to be very convenient and useful. And while most of the time people share links to blogs or online newspaper articles, sometimes it’s just hearsay. That means I’d need to verify the information I just get before I take it in as facts.

Case in point… there’s a lot of talk about Google’s pending withdrawal from the China market and all kinds of rumors are flying around online. Often people say things without citing their sources. Other times, people say things without making clear if it’s an opinion or a fact. In short, it exposes a problem with reading stuff on social media — it’s not always validated. (Maybe the next question is, do they have to be?)

This is not to say I think everything I see on New York Times or CNN.com is always true and I never question their reporting. But there’s a stronger sense of trust and accountability with established news resources (excluding Chinese media, of course). With them, you know someone can get fired and have their reputation ruined for writing something unsubstantiated and posing it as a fact.

As I’m waiting (as everyone else is) to hear an official statement from Google on its China plans, I’m sitting here and wondering if there is in fact a danger with social media as it is great at spreading information which sometimes can be false and misleading. In the extreme cases, it could indeed lead to less than desirable results, say, social unrest…

Don’t get me wrong. I love the free flow of information. I think it’s vital for a society to have that. But it is also scary how people as a collective can be ignorant in dissecting what they see and read or waste too much of their time and energy on silly things (just look at the online celebrities in China and how disturbing they can be and yet they manage to become wildly popular public figures).

I guess for now it’s a double-edged sword that I’m happy to have. It certainly is something that brings us more good than bad.