To Tweet To Then Retweet And Verify Later: Habit That Powers Fake News And Hate Speech

Twitter has been known to be a place where information piles up very fast. The good thing is that, pretty much of the 'real' world is there, but the bad thing is, many of them aren't real.

Social media is a place to share experience, express thoughts, opinions and feelings. Be it religious or political, to anything in between. social media is like somehow a haven where free speech happens, at any time.

But here is the catch: information are flowing too fast, faster than most people can digest. So to understand the truth, it's kind of murky there.

Why is this happening there? It's because people just love to tweet, to then retweet. But if it was a mistake, they rather verify it later, after the tweet/retweet has gone viral.

This is a careless journalism that is made by both professionals and amateur netizens. They just want to deliver things fast and faster, before crosschecking the legitimacy.

Realizing the consequences or not, sloppy and not legitimate tweets that go viral, can cause shockwave through newsroom, cause chaos in the market, making people speculate and conclude of something, that may not be the fact.

The line between professional reporting and personal beliefs become so blurred that the truth seems to be obscured by people's own thoughts and motivations.

When personal beliefs are immediately validated and accordingly, the story is blasted out across social media with many people consuming them without doing the basic fact-check.

In turn, this creates a mistrust between media publishers and the world of journalism. The habit of tweet and retweet to verify later, have caused reputational harm to whoever reported it first

So why can this happen? Besides people wanting to deliver things fast, they also want their posts to be fantastical, historical, phenomenal and almost too-good-to-be-true tweets.

Users that include publishers and media companies, want to generate as much likes, retweets and followers possible. This created the inevitable race to post breaking news on a topic with a high likelihood of going viral - meaning anything to from sloppy reporting that hate speech may happen.

Apparently, this is what powers fake news and the spread of hoaxes.

Not that publishers and social media users need to crosscheck everything before posting and digesting, they also need to know the consequences of quick actions. A post may create and destroy one's reputation. So if the aim is to get viral, for the sake on the growing internet, know that those post will do harm to everyone in it.