Much ink has been spilled over the unreliably of the torrent of Tweets coming out of Iran, but I just want to point out that, specifically, what keeps Twitter from being a good source of information is that sources cannot be independently confirmed. Which is to say, normally, if multiple, separate sources tell you the same story, you can be pretty sure that what they're saying is true--their stories are mutually corroborating.
Of course, this doesn't work if the sources had an opportunity to collude before you could question them, for the obvious reason that they could have agreed on a lie.
Because Twitter allows everyone to see what everyone else is saying, it allows all sources the opportunity to "collude"--there are many voices, but none of them have the power to corroborate what any of the other voices are saying.
So the irony here is that the very ease of information sharing is what is preventing us from getting reliable information. I wonder if there's some clever way you could get around this? One thing that comes to mind is that videos and photos can corroborate each other via their metadata: if two different videos depict the same event, and they both purport to have been taken at the same time and place, then that is good evidence that the metadata is accurate, simply because it is unlikely that a person has the wherewithal to alter the metadata on his video to be similar to one that is already posted on the internet somewhere--it would be a difficult thing to "collude" on.
The drawback here, though, is that videos and photos are not tagged with metadata in a standard way (I don't think), so we aren't able to do this analysis (it's not like the date and location of the video/photo is contained in the file header (again: I don't think)). But I think you could really get somewhere if the metadata were in place.
(Photo by carrotcreative)
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