London Riots: Twitter goes from 'best place for breaking news to best place for breaking bullshit'

Online video journalist Adam Westbrook (pictured) posts on his blog today about the confusion caused by inaccurate reports on Twitter of rioting in the area of London in which he lives.

Adam also says he retweeted images said to be from Liverpool that in fact were from London. He concludes the use of Twitter is "messy" and warns that non-journalists are less likely to verify sources of information on social media.

Adam writes: "I live in Balham in South West London, where there was some looting (I saw, photographed and shared images of T-Mobile and a Carphone Warehouse which had been smashed in around 1030 pm) – but relatively minor. That didn’t stop the #balham hashtag becoming a regular stream of all of the above. People reported the big supermarket had been looted (it hadn’t); there were claims of petrol bombs at the Tesco garage (there were none).

"As one local tweeter, @DoktorWatson put it:

In one night, Twitter has gone from the best place for breaking news to the best place for breaking bullshit. #balham tag especially

"Such was the confusion, several local tweeters felt compelled to walk the streets to just find out the truth, potentially putting themselves at risk.

"Media became a problem. Around 1am, I lazily retweeted footage which I thought showed police clashing with thugs in Liverpool. Quick clarification came that the footage came from London, not Liverpool, and the Youtube uploader was regularly changing the title of the video.

"Trying, instead, to focus on the surprising stories, I congratulated a local tweeter who was cleverly noting the licence plate numbers of cars turning up to loot from shops outside her house. I was criticised for drawing attention to her profile which had a clear picture of her face on it (but, of course, she posted the tweet in the first place).

"So to sum up…it’s messy.

"On the plus side, I do think real-time web’s ability to self correct is extraordinary. My blunderous retweet was corrected within five minutes. If you don’t mind taking stern words from other users, it’s a rock solid facet to the platform.

"However, Twitter being used by journalists, who (hopefully!) question sources and try to verify, is one thing. But non-journalists aren’t necessarily as skeptical of information. A rumour to a journalist could be read as fact by someone else, especially people who are scared."

Adam adds: "I still stand by the argument that Twitter is not being used to organise or incite violence. But now I wonder whether exaggerating violence in one place, or spreading rumours about violence in another (as innocent/naive as it is) could potentially encourage those who do want to cause damage?"

• Jon S: Adam is right to highlight the dangers of unverified riot reports but I think there has been some excellent front line coverage of the riots on Twitter by the Guardian's @PaulLewis; the Camden New Journal team of @RichardOsley @tomfoot1 @dannycarrier and the Croydon Advertiser's Gareth Davies @Gareth Davies09.
  
  

Twitter bows to court action and hands over user contact details to British councillors and officials

Twitter has bowed to a court action brought by local councillors complaining that they were libelled in tweets, the Telegraph reports.

The individuals who brought the legal action were councillors and officials at a local authority, South Tyneside. They launched the case in an attempt to unmask an anonymous whistle-blower who calls himself Mr Monkey.

The Telegraph says: "The action is believed to have cost council tax payers hundreds of thousands of pounds.The unprecedented ruling has prompted a row over freedom of speech, with experts warning that it may lead to a flood of actions by lawyers in other cases seeking to obtain personal information about people who breach super-injunctions or post libellous messages on Twitter."

The Telegraph adds: "In their attempt to unmask Mr Monkey, the South Tyneside councillors and officials went to court in California, where Twitter is based.

"They obtained a ruling ordering the company to release contact details, location information and computer addresses of the individuals behind four accounts on the website. The court granted the order after it was told, by lawyers for the council, that messages posted on the accounts had been libellous."

The Telegraph notes the case "comes as lawyers for Ryan Giggs, the Manchester United footballer, attempt to obtain details of individuals who named him on Twitter as the holder of an injunction to protect details of his personal life."

• More background to this story at the Sheilds Gazette

Nationals step up assault on super-injunctions

The national press is today keeping up its assault on super-injunctions claiming Twitter has humiliated the courts and made the injunctions look pointless by publishing the information judges say should be secret.

The Times asks: "What is the difference between a traditional news outlet and a website? If you are reading online, you might think that the answer is nothing. Yet, type another address at the top of your screen, and you could read of matters that The Times is legally prohibited from reporting. This is an absurd situation. It institutionalises the deception of the public, damages responsible media in favour of those with fewer qualms, and makes a mockery of the rule of law."

The Independent: "In what has been described as the "Spycatcher moment" of the internet era, a single user of Twitter has brought the culture of the super-injunction to its knees by drawing nearly 55,000 followers to a list of celebrities alleged to have links with the secretive gagging orders.The frenzy of activity on the micro-blogging site yesterday makes the super-injunctions as ineffective as the ban placed on publication of the autobiography of the MI5 officer Peter

Wright in the mid 1980s."

Daily Mail: "Internet gossip has brought the whole existence of celebrity super-injunctions into jeopardy, legal experts warned last night.Millions of computer users have now found the leaked names of TV stars and footballers who believed the gagging orders would keep their sexual indiscretions secret.In addition, a report on the future of privacy law by a leading judge has been delayed amid the growing row over the controversial injunctions."

The Sun: "How appropriate that stars who behaved like twits should be exposed on Twitter. Once again Britain's medieval gagging orders look absurd as the internet hums with revelations newspapers are banned from repeating - even though newspapers got the stories in the first place."

• There was some good news on privacy for newspapers today. Max Mosley lost his European Court case in which he was claiming papers should be forced to notify the subject of a story in advance if it infringed their privacy.

Mail gets all atwitter over super-injunctions fiasco

A Twittter user who is posting alleged details of the super-injunctions taken out by actors and sports stars has more than 30,000 followers in a direct challenge to the law and to the immense frustration of the British press gagged by the courts.

The Daily Mail claims today: "The social networking site Twitter today made a mockery of the celebrity trend for using privacy injunctions to hide their identity.A single user, who quickly attracted a following of 5,000, set up an account claiming to ‘out’ those behind the legal gagging orders – but riddled with errors.

"So many Twitter users began exchanging messages supposedly naming high-profile figures who have hidden their secrets that part of the site crashed."

The Mail adds: "The move exposed the total inadequacy of court rulings which gag the press – but have no effective control over what is published online."

The paper quotes Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming saying: "It shows the utter absurdity of what is being done in the courts. It ignores the way that modern communication works.

"Normally these things are kept so that only a few people in North London know what is going on. But more recently people have been coming to my constituency surgery and telling me that they know who these people are."

• Twitter users have also highlighted a quote in yesterday's Mail on Sunday about the actor Hugh Bonneville: "Hugh’s devotion to wife Lulu is so strong it is understood he is known to fellow thespians as the Ryan Giggs of the showbusiness world, after the famously family-orientated footballer."

How Twitter broke news that Bin Laden was dead

Michael Calderone on the Huffington Post has written about the role Twitter played in revealing that Osama Bin Laden was dead.

Calderone writes: "White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer notified the world via Twitter that Obama would be making a major announcement, but provided no details of what was to come.

"And it was over Twitter that the story exploded -- from word of a mysterious presidential announcement to early guesses to informed speculation and, eventually, to unconfirmed reports that bin Laden had been killed.

"Keith Urbahn, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's chief of staff, scooped the national press by tweeting around 10:25 p.m. that he’d been “told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden.”

"Whether from non-journalists like Urbahn or mainstream reporters soon after, many people first learned of the U.S. firefight that killed the terrorist leader over social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and text-messaging. (Amazingly, IT consultant Sohaib Athar, who unknowingly lived near the bin Laden compound in Pakistan, actually live-tweeted the U.S. special forces attack on the al Qaeda leader without realizing what he had witnessed."

• piersmorgan Piers Morgan tweeted: "Sign of our times: I heard news of Bin Laden's death from Twitter when I landed in NY last night. Just a random tweeter "
• BBC News has a report on how the Bin Laden raid was revealed on Twitter