Digital Smarts - Twitter is a Disaster During a Disaster

This may not surprise you, but during disasters, Twitter is full of false information. When confronted with falsehoods, “86 to 91 percent of the users spread the false news by retweeting or liking,” reports a new study from the University at Buffalo. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate how apt Twitter users are at debunking falsehoods during disasters,” said Jun Zhuang, associate professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the school, and the lead author of the study. “Unfortunately, the results paint a less-than-flattering picture”.