Misunderstanding of Information on Twitter

Internet is definitely practical to search and find or encounter useful information. However, sometimes (or often) I find the cases of people misunderstanding or mistaking the information.

Why I often see people misunderstand the information they are reading? That is because they are just reading the impressive words which is picked up by other internet users. This case is adapted to Twitter. The social site where people communicate by short messages tends to causes misrecognition of what is written. This is no doubt because people express their opinions in just a few sentences from larger contexts. One of the advantages twitter has is people can quickly catch up with news, but there’s some of users who read a few phrases from the entire and misperceive it. This is seen in the situation where a tweet shared with a link of an article retweeted more than e.g. 1000 times and many people reply to it. I understand some just don’t read or don’t have time to read an article entirely, but if a person with lack of understanding of context post a tweet with his/her wrong understanding and it’s shared by many people, he/she is spreading wrong information to others.

In particular, There’s problem of fake-news. The current internet system causes the spread of fake news. Take a look at Twitter again, users can instantly retweet and spread information to others. But this easiness of sharing results in the cases that people do not take fact-check. When people get interesting or surprising information, they immediately spread to others without confirming whether the source is trustworthy or not. Media literacy matters so much in this modern age and each needs to take a breath before spreading.

Thanks to advancement of technology, we can see information easily. Social media like Twitter is a useful tool to get updated efficiently. But in some aspects, we need to pay attention to the usage of them. Just in case, this article is no offense to Twitter, I totally agree that it is a great service. What I want to say in this article is that unless we pay attention to how we use the useful service, it will be less valuable than the essential worth. In the era of information, we have to be careful of how to use.