May 15, 2009

People on ‘Ludes Should Not Drive — and People With Marginal Reading Comprehension Should Not Twitter

UPDATE: Gawker (which says everything I’d like to say about this ridiculous story), appears to have found “Patient Zero.” Details after the jump.

Some idiot (which is the nicest word I can think of right now) Twittered that California had overturned Proposition 8.

The cynic in me says this was a deliberately cruel joke, while the truth appears to be it was simply a mistake — but the result is no less cruel. And if it was begun by the Los Angeles Times (see the screencap at the link), somebody’s ass needs to be sacked — who can trust a “reporter” that (presumably) careless?

Per Venture Beat:

This just in from Twitter — California’s Prop. 8, which amended the state constitution to ban gay marriage, has been overturned by the state Supreme Court. Since I’m a typical San Francisco liberal, you can probably guess how I reacted. To paraphrase some of the comments on Twitter: We won!

Except, oh wait, we didn’t. Everyone tweeting about gay marriage’s victory failed to look at the time stamp on the article being linked to, or only saw the date, not the year. In fact, it’s an article from May 2008, and it covers the Supreme Court’s overturning of an early anti-gay marriage proposition — in other words, it’s about the court decision that led to Prop. 8 being put on the ballot. Oops.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Supreme Court still hasn’t reached a decision on whether the proposition was constitutional. And the rest of us are left to marvel at this example of the real-time web in action. Right now, there are still hundreds of tweets popping up every few minutes, some of them spreading the incorrect info about the proposition being overturned, some trying to correct things, others wondering how this all started.

Update: Looks like this isn’t just the story of new media misinformation, but of an old media screwup, too. It may have been an accidental tweet by the Los Angeles Times itself that started the rumor — at least, that’s what’s implied by the Times’ tweet below. …

Screencaps at the link.

UPDATE: Gawker reflects my disgust, and narrows down the origin of this mass hysteria:

At roughly noon today, someone “Tweeted” the news that the California Supreme Court had overturned the state’s ban on gay marriage, supplying their “followers” with this Los Angeles Times story as proof. The story, as anyone who can read can see, is dated May 16, 2008, right there at the top…

But Twitter doesn’t sweat the details! Thousands of users “re-Tweeted” it or whatever, and before you know it, the Los Angeles Times’ own fucking Twitter feed was sending the gay marriage news out to its 19,700-plus followers. Gawker alum Ana Marie Cox was hearing the news in her Air America Radio studio (and realizing it was false). The New Yorker’s Tad Friend was celebrating the news. People were literally writing that they were crying at their desks at the news that gay people can get married in California now, when they in fact can’t, because no one—not even the intern in charge of the Los Angeles Times’s Twitter feed!—actually read the goddamn story.

So how did it happen? Twitter’s time-stamping is fuzzy, so it’s impossible to locate the original offending Tweet with precision. But Gawker’s candidate for Patient Zero is Meredith Modzelewski, the Brooklyn blogger whose Tweet about the story showed up earliest in Twitter’s search results. Interestingly, Modzelewski linked to a now-dead ABC News story, not the L.A. Times piece.

Contacted by Gawker, Modzelewski says—ironically—that she first heard the fake news through a pre-Twitter mode of communication: “From a friend” who in turn had read about it on someone’s Facebook page. …

So she “Tweeted” it and the next thing you know it’s a Twitter shitstorm and the L.A. Times is embarrassingly “Tweeting” that it’s earlier “Tweet” “does not reflect any new news“…