Hi All-

I was on Facebook today and I clicked on one of the trending topics regarding a girl who posted a terrorist joke to American Airline's Twitter page. I read the article and attempted to find sources that the author listed. There were none. So I did a Google search and did find a few articles from sources that I do not know to be reliable, who also did not list sources and who wrote in a less than professional tone. I then searched a website that I consider to be reliable with no luck. Next, I attempted to check the Twitter account with no luck again. There were a lot of people tweeting about the topic but I could not find the original tweet.

So the question becomes: "Should I believe this story?" Absent of factual information I can not bring myself to believe this story 100%. But, it is something that I believe could easily happen. As I learned in PBS Frontline: Digital Nation video entitled Living Their Lives Online, teens often have a different mentality behind what they post. Teens will often post things that most adults would consider to be inappropriate(Frontline, 2010).

Even though I was not able to be 100% certain as to the truthfulness of this post, I do believe that social media sites can provide accurate information about news. I look for transparent websites and I employ many of the techniques in Blur, How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload, by Kovach and Rosenstiel. Kovach and Rosenstiel provide a general guide as to what questions to ask yourself before you determine whether or not something is true (Kovach and Rosenstiel, 2010).

I find the most reliable social media posts to be non-news related. For example, I find social media sites to be particularly useful for do it yourself tasks and for recipes, etc. These types of posts are often done by the poster before creating the post. They frequently document each step of the process so that one can reproduce their results.

I use social media to supplement traditional learning or to fortify information that I already know.  A lot of the things that I look up online will not greatly impact my life if the information is in accurate, for example if I need to know the definition of a word or I'm curious about the latest celebrity gossip. I don't usually check into these types of inquiries. But if I ever need accurate information, I don't rely on what one social media website says. I do research, a lot of research.

References:

Kovach, B., & Rosenstiel, T. (2010). Blur: How to know what's true in the age of information overload. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

Living their lives online. (2010, February 2). Retrieved April 9, 2014, from http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/relationships/identity/living-their-lives-online.html?play