AP's Botched Tweet Is Reminder Twitter Needs to Address Corrections

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Image: Harrison Eastwood

By Seth Fiegerman2014-07-23 19:11:57 UTC

The Associated Press made news on Wednesday, but not the kind it intended.

The news organization put out a breaking news update that the plane carrying the bodies of victims from the Malaysia Airlines crash in Ukraine had landed in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, the way that update was worded led many to mistakenly believe the plane with the remains had crashed as well.

Some rightly questioned whether a plane landing safely merits the "BREAKING" news treatment. Perhaps that was part of the reason why those who saw the original update were primed to believe another plane had crashed. When you see a breaking news alert about an airplane, it's usually not good news.

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After 10 minutes — and many bewildered tweets from Twitter users — the Associated Press put out another update to clarify the more benign meaning of the original breaking news alert and later even put out a blog post calling the wording of the first tweet "an especially regrettable lapse."

But then a funny and all too predictable thing happened: the original tweet, which was not deleted, continued to be shared, topping 2,000 retweets, then 3,000 retweets and then 4,000.

You can blame the Associated Press for the misleading phrasing originally, but the fact that the original misleading tweet continued to be passed around after it issued a clarification is arguably more the fault of Twitter as the platform functions now.

If this had been the headline or first sentence of an article, the Associated Press might have tweaked the phrasing and indicated on the article page that the text had been changed. If it had been a Facebook post, the AP could have edited it to note the clarification. If it had been a push notification — well, in fact, it was sent as a push notification and the AP simply issued another, which went to all the users who received the first.

On Twitter, the options to correct or clarify a tweet after it has been posted are far more limited. You can delete the original tweet, but this may be viewed as an effort to conceal a mistake, and it does nothing to clarify the error to those who have already viewed the tweet. (In the case of the AP, the tweet isn't factually wrong, it's just worded poorly.) You can post another tweet with an update, as the AP did, but there's no guarantee it will reach the same audience.

This is certainly not the first time misleading or incorrect breaking news has spread on Twitter, and it certainly won't be the last. In the past, some have argued that Twitter needs to introduce the option to edit posts, or let the user mark a previous tweet as incorrect with a strikethrough or another indicator. However, each of these options would represent a bit of a radical departure from how Twitter has functioned until this point, which may be why it hasn't adopted either.

I reached out to Twitter about this subject earlier this month after a tweet of mine went viral, but the followup tweet clarifying it did not. Twitter declined to comment on the issue of corrections.

At the time, I tried two tactics to make the correction to my tweet more prominent: I posted the correction as a reply to the original tweet in the hopes that anyone viewing the original would see the update, and I pinned that correction tweet to my profile page for the day to make it more prominent. I knew the latter would only have a minimal impact as most people don't click through the tweet to a profile page, but I thought the former might be effective. Then I realized the problem: My reply to my own tweet was buried underneath all the replies from other users. No one even saw it.

If Twitter has any interest in improving the corrections process on the social network, perhaps it can try letting publications like the AP issue a correction in reply to its own tweets and have it automatically show up as the first response. That way any user who clicks on the original tweet will actually see the update.

It won't solve the whole corrections problem on Twitter, but at least it's a start.

Topics: Business, Media, Twitter