Twitter birds are liars

How reliable is Twitter as a source of information, especially when other media channels are sleeping?

Twitter itself is saying that they are without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now. Well, I must agree about the way to share and “right now” but "discover"  thing should be improved with words  “discover what is happening right now in the mind of users fantasy”.

Let’s take an example. 19 of December. The elections of Belarus president where Alexander Lukashenko won. the things what happened after the elections in short: 

Thousands of opposition protesters in Belarus have tried to storm the government headquarters, following the country's presidential election. A lot of people injured, because demonstration broke out in the capital city of Minsk in support of opposition presidential candidates. It happened because Alexander Lukashenko has been declared the winner, but the opposition claimed that the result was rigged. Interesting note: European Union promised to give 3 billion euros to Belarus, if the election will be held in democratic way. More about the protest  read here.

While all the media kept silent, the social network Twitter made an awesome buzz. Hundreds of new tweets every minute wrote about the situation in Minsk. All the main information channels was waiting something. One of the most popular tweets was: „CNN, BBC, Euronews WHERE ARE YOU?! Yes, Korea is tense and yes, it's snowing, but the big story is October Sq, Minsk, Belarus.”

On that time it was the only source of information to understand, what is happening in October Square. From this point of view, the Twitter really showed it’s power, when the other media channels are slow or unwilling to broadcast the happening. One very popular tweet of that night was: „The entire value of Twitter is not in tweets like "I'm Valerie, I was in a toilet ", but manly in such kind of moments.”

At the same time the main information what was retweeted the most was that there are tanks all around October square and 4 people are already killed in Minsk.” These messages created mistrust in my mind, because there was no prove- is it true or not. Hundreds of people retweeted this information and spread all over. 
Next day when finally news channels started to give an information about this happening, nobody talked about tanks and killed people. Why? Because it was lie. Anyone could write down whatever come in mind and spread it, because the attention for any information about this event was enormous. Those twitter users who didn’t understand the tweets in Russian but wanted to know what is happening, asked to translate these tweets in English. More and more misleading information came out. Another interesting thing. While this buzz in Twitter happened, immediately a fake profile of the Belarus president was made, where "he" gave "his" opinion, which again was immediately retweeted.

So, how really powerful is twitter in such kind of moments when people are the journalists and tell the news? The bright and really amazing thing is that you can get these news immediately and from the person involved in the happening, but from the other point of view, they have the opportunity  to manipulate and spread untruth information. I don’t say that the news channels doesn’t do, but I think it’s more about hiding the information or telling the half true. In Twitter case the lies are more brutal.