As a sports fan, I spent mostly all of yesterday sitting on my couch watching the NBA playoffs with some friends. While I was watching the games, I would check my twitter account during commercial breaks to check up on anything that was happening behind the scenes, on the benches or off the camera.
After watching the Chicago Bulls game, I knew Derrick Rose had a knee injury, but no one was aware of the extent of it. NBA fans everywhere were waiting on the edge of their seat, hoping it wasn't anything too serious.
And then I read this on twitter: "Derrick Rose out with a torn ACL and MCL. Will miss the rest of the playoffs."
Immediately my friends and I enter a 'oh my god what will happen to the Bulls now?' conversation for the the next 15 minutes. We couldn't believe the news and no one (except for my friend who likes the Heat) was happy about this injury.
Less than an hour later, @NBCMiami tweets out "Report of Derrick Rose's injury was premature, his status is unknown."
After I read that out to my friends, completely negating all conversation we just had, it made me wonder: Does news travel too fast on Twitter? Is news reliable at all on Twitter?
I guess this senario just reinforces that, no matter what, you still have to be critical of everything you are viewing and reading. Even though news on Rose eventually came out that he really did tear his ACL, for a brief moment, that one tweet stirred up an irrelevant conversation at the time. Call it a lesson learned: Twitter is not the all-knowing, all-powerful source of information in the universe.
If you want to really see how the Twitter fraud played out and all check that out here.
Literally the exact same thing happened to me after Game 2 (?) between the Knicks and Heat, when Amare Stoudemire punched some glass and cut his hand. Of the several non-news sources that were discussing it as soon as happened, one of them being twitter, rumors ranged from Stoudemire suffering a small cut to half of his hand dangling from ligaments. I too recognized during that time that regardless of what actually happened, the information we were provided differed drastically in accuracy. The news was certainly made available to public instantaneously because of the internet, but at the cost of accurate information.
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