The question of how journalists should handle incorrect tweets has sparked some interesting discussions recently, but no easy answers.
The discussion picked up last month after NPR, Reuters, CNN and the BBC all incorrectly tweeted that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords had died, raising questions about whether news organizations should delete incorrect tweets or instead leave them as is and write a corrected follow-up tweet.
In response to this debate, we asked Web developer Adrian Holovaty for his thoughts on building a Twitter correction tool — a system for spreading the word about inaccuracies in tweets.
During a live chat, which was a follow-up to last month’s chat on how to handle incorrect tweets, Holovaty discussed his ideas about how such a tool might work and sought feedback from chat participants. He was joined by Regret the Error’s Craig Silverman, who has written about what he thinks a Twitter correction function would look like.
As a next step, Holovaty plans to create a demo of what a correction tool would look like. We will let you know once he has created it.
You can revisit this page at any time to replay the chat.
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