Oink, Oink - Tweet, Tweet!

If you type Swine Flu in the search bar on Twitter, the amount of members tweeting about it is overwhelming! Whether it was to gain more followers and boost one’s popularity (by tweeting about a highly searched topic), or out of actual concern, the overload of uneducated information was an epidemic in and of itself.

Honestly, how much useful information can come from a 140 character tweet? Not much in this case. Unfortunately, people still have that mentality that “I read it on the internet, so it must be true,” and with tweets that touched on everything from chemical warfare- to an over exaggerated amount of deaths, Twitter in some instances was creating more hype and hysteria than needed.

That’s not to say everything posted on Twitter was misleading. CNN’s Head Medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) were very active, informative and effective in helping users understand the virus and what the necessary precautions are to keep from getting it. Healthmap also provided a map of all reported cases around the world. But, these tweets are buried in the vast amounts of “infected tweets” that carry a potent strain of useless info! Watch out, they are bad for your brain!

Overall, Twitter is an extremely powerful and effective tool when it comes to getting a message out and informing other users (just ask President Obama). At the same time, anyone with an internet connection can join in on a conversation, no matter how big or small, and put their two cents in, and that’s just scary. But in the end, it is our responsibilities as users and participants to decipher what information is useful and what information is flat out slop. After all, just because they call it “viral” messaging, doesn’t mean we have to take it so literally.