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Hurricane Sandy and Twitter | Pew Research Center's Journalism Project
http://www.journalism.org/2012/11/06/hurricane-s...
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For millions who lost power but could still access the internet on mobile devices, Twitter served as a critical lifeline throughout the disaster that struck on October 29.
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a few news operations, such as Huffington Post and the aggregator BuzzFeed saw their servers go down and turned to Twitter and other social media to deliver reports.
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According to Twitter, people sent more than 20 million tweets about the storm from October 27 through November
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But, as can happen in the open and fast-moving environment of social media, some accounts shared by many, including mainstream news organizations, turned out to be false.
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One of the most-discussed was the claim that the New York Stock Exchange floor had flooded with three feet of water and that the power company, Con Edison, was shutting off power to all of Manhattan. The original tweets, from @ComfortablySmug, were passed along by a number of news organizations, including CNN and New York Magazine. Others on Twitter quickly debunked the rumors.
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The aggregator BuzzFeed eventually identified @ComfortablySmug as Shashank Tripathi, a hedge fund manager and campaign manager for Republican congressional candidate, Christopher R. Wight.
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“In response to thousands of retweets of erroneous Weather Channel and CNN reports that the New York Stock Exchange had been flooded with ‘three feet’ of water, Twitter users, some reporters and many not, were relentless: Photos of the outside of the building, flood-free, were posted. Knowledgeable parties weighed in.”
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As with some of the text-based tweets, though, some images turned out to have been faked. Twitter users were quick to point out the false images that had been doctored or even from previous storms. One image, of a flooded McDonalds, was actually a work of art from years earlier.
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How much of the imagery on Twitter was fake was hard to know, and that in itself became a topic of discussion. An Atlantic article explaining which photos were real and which were fake, was often shared over social media.
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This also included people urging their followers to donate to organizations that provide aid to those affected by the hurricane. Many of these tweets came from people unaffected by the storm, who weighed in with their concern.
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