Check before you retweet: bloggers
If you wish to know how fatal speed without accuracy can be, ask a professional racer who crashed his car. Or ask fans of ghazal maestro Jagjit Singh who were heart-wrecked each time someone erroneously tweeted “RIPjagjitsingh” recently. The singer was critical, but stable, said doctors, but over-zealous tweeples went overboard. And what began as a rumour turned into a trending topic as celebrities began retweeting it to thousands of their fans.
The egg in the face needed damage control, so celebs like Neha Dhupia shared, “Sry about the last tweet. And thanks for correcting me people. I just heard a bad rumor. Hope jagit ji gets well soon. Apologies once again!” This was quickly followed by Tushar Gandhi, saying, “Appologies to all who were hurt by my RIP Jagjeet Singh tweet & who retweeted beliving me. No 1 more delighted than I to know I am wrong.”
In Twitter terms, “big following comes with great responsibility”, hence it becomes an individual’s responsibility to ensure his\her facts are correct. “It’s imperative to refrain from tweeting without confirming a news. Spreading rumours just isn’t right,” says cricketer Aakash Chopra.
“Twitter has become the first source of news for many. We’re now used to news breaking on Twitter, even before websites and TV. And as a lot many tweets emanate from journalists people trust tweets blindly,” says stand-up comedian and freelance writer, Gursimran Khamba.
And rumour aggravates because all it takes to retweet is a click. “While retweeting ‘RIP’ messages you’re generally so emotional that you don’t wait. Bill Cosby, for instance, was declared dead on Twitter,” adds Khamba. Cosby had to make a TV appearance to confirm he was well and truly alive.
“We’re so enthusiastic about tweeting that we forget to cross-check. We don’t realise the effect that it can have,” says stand-up comedian and emcee, Vikram Sathaye.
It’s now become a competition to show how “cool” we are. “Even though it maybe a singer you’ve never heard of, or an actor you’ve never watched, there is a need to tell the world that you know them, just to show how ‘cool’ you are,” Khamba replies in jest.
But fact-hunting is even necessary in case of deaths, natural calamities and disorder — issues that need to be dealt with caution. Those that tweeted about the death of a cricketer’s son in an accident were red-faced when it was proven incorrect. “The immediate reaction was of grief,” says Vikram.
It is important to learn a lesson, says Khamba, who once went through it. “I had accidentally retweeted a news link last year and later when it turned out to be untrue I apologised. If it happens once or twice and the person aplogises, then people are generally fine with it. But you would have to be really stupid to do it again and again,” he sums up.
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