Bring on the #moron filter

The post I made a couple of days ago about Twitter’s coverage of the sustained terror assault on the city of Mumbai was by far the most viewed post we’ve made here. It obviously struck a chord. Bits of it ended up on CNN Asia.

In that post, I was responding to the social melee forming around the end of a dirty big fire-hose of re-tweeting, rumour and shocked reaction. The thing I felt most strongly about when the terror was actually unfolding second-by-bloody-second was the triumphal glee that some contributors were expressing that Twitter was ahead of the mainstream media in reporting ‘the event’. In some peoples’ minds the main event was the defeat of CNN by Twitter and the ‘victory’ of social media in general. It was pretty ridiculous even at that stage as a very large proportion of the total tweetage was actually reporting what was happening on television – and then the re-tweets with added conjecture that followed.

A very few people indulged in really ugly displays of aggression and hate and this has, sadly, continued.

Yes, it does sound bad.

Some people say that this is just the way a real conversation works, you just put up with the noise and disparate views, but that’s nonsense. In meatspace you either walk away from the twats or you ask them to keep their voices down. In fact, the only conversations in any way ‘like’ the busiest period of the other night’s hashtag Mumbai event are shouty drunken lock-ins, the 11.45 booze-train burger queue at London Bridge Rail Station on a Thursday night, or a football riot. In any case, at that stage we weren’t looking for ‘conversation’ – it was precisely because Twitter was ahead of the curve and there was little ‘official’ information that we wanted to know so badly what was really going on. At that really critical early stage, working out what was happening was made much more difficult by these morons. It may sound elitist but, clearly, all views are not equal.

And this problem didn’t just affect rubber-necking news-junkies like me, it also made it more difficult to for those people who actually really needed to find emergency numbers, or ask for ask for blood donations. It must have been truly horrible if you were there trying to find out if a loved one was okay. The sheer volume of rubbish tweeting made it more difficult to find useful links. There were plenty of them, but maybe 6 out 10 tweets were just noise.

Sadly, it’s unlikely to be the last time Twitter is used in this way, and so I’ve been wondering if there are ways to introduce a filtered version of the next event-stream on a #Mumbai scale. I’m not suggesting replacing the #[insert event name] search stream – but offering an additional, optional stream that has been ‘filtered’ by a team of trusted curators. In a blog post he made yesterday JP Rangaswami (Confused of Calcutta) put it like this:

Sometimes I think about all this as a giant virtual switchboard manned by volunteers, willing and able to help. We should be thinking about how we can improve all this. How we can set up this virtual switchboard effectively. How we can help quash rumours. How we can take the load off the security and emergency services people.

Who could we trust to do this? People on Twitter with a certain level of reputation? People who have passed what would basically be a crowd-sourced audition? And what about brand-endorsed twitterers? Instead of childishly bashing CNN why don’t we all work together to create a global panel of ‘trusted twitterers’ with them – of people who have passed certain filters? Of course, even to think about doing that would require a new attitude to old media. We’ll have to get over the “CNN is so over, dude…” tendency. We must stop thinking that it’s necessary to continually demonstrate and celebrate the power of social media. And we need to be honest about how it needs to evolve and get better. I don’t feel as optimistic as JP does about the self-corrective power of the crowd. I’m not sure it’s good enough to say that because real-life crowds always result in Chinese whispers we should accept it as an inevitable fact of life on Twitter in all circumstances. Of course, it is inevitable – in the sense that we won’t change human nature – but we can use Twitter in many different ways, and one way to improve it for some specific circumstances would be to engineer a social editorial filter. Don’t we want Twitter to evolve, to mature, to become even better? What we use today is a very immature version of what all media might become – ever-present, real-time/near-real-time, personal, participatory. It can continue to be all of these things *and* we can make it better too.

The solution I’ve been pondering is deliberately technology-lite, and that’s because we need to come up with something now. I reckon you could probably do this using a Tumble-log – most of the effort would be involved in creating a network of trusted curators and agreeing some basic groundrules. Nevertheless, it would also be healthy to consider technological solutions. I found one service on the night that claims to have created an algorithm based on filtering contributions at the beginning of an ‘event’ (see below). I can’t work out how and I can’t see much evidence of it. Apologies if I’m missing something – can anyone tell me how it works? (It’s called Tweetip and you can find it here).

And then there’s the The Dashboard of Doom: a horizontally scrolling mash-up of the leading Mumbai related #hashtags, Flickr-streams and Dipity timelines.

Please drop me a line to let me know what you think about ‘the next time’, and how we might clean the signal up a bit.

I’ll leave you with a selection of some of the more striking screen-grabs I’ve taken from the #Mumbai stream over the last few days. And cheers to my brother Ben, who helped out with this and the last post.