Social media are self-correcting

Three days have passed since contact was lost with Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Like many people, once the news broke I followed the latest developments through micro blogs and the popular instant messaging service WeChat. There was good and bad news, but much of it has proved to be rumor as nothing is yet known of what happened to the plane and its passengers and crew.

Rumors have become a sure companion of such incidents. After the Fukushima nuclear accident in March 2011, a rumor spread that a change in the wind direction would blow radiation across China, which led to panic-buying of iodized salt after another rumor spread it would help prevent radiation poisoning. Such rumors spread quickly through the social media, thus many blame the medium rather than the messenger.

But while it is easy for rumors to quickly spread as more and more people click "forward", it is also easy to quickly correct rumors in the same way as new information comes to light.

According to H. Taylor Bucker, associate professor of sociology at Concordia University, it is often the lack of substantive information that renders a person's critical abilities impotent and makes them believe rumors. Lies have short legs, as the old saying goes, and rumors lose their appeal when the truth emerges. So the way to stop rumors from spreading is to reveal the truth as soon as possible.

The rumors such as the one about the cloud of radiation heading for China from Fukushima were all consigned to the trash bin when countered by the truth.

While offering channels for rumors to spread, it is also true that social media offer channels for truths to be widely known. Moreover social media have increased the possibility of discovering the truth, as there are many pieces to a puzzle, and the more pieces of a puzzle one collects, the easier it is to work it out. Social networks with hundreds of millions of users interacting also make it easier to discover the different pieces of the puzzle.

But to effectively prevent the spread of rumors, social networks should rally support from media professionals. Journalistic professionalism is indispensable in joining fragmented pieces of information together to reveal a true picture of what happened.

For example, on Dec 4, some photos were spread online allegedly showing an elderly woman blackmailing a foreigner in Beijing by accusing him of knocking her down with his scooter. It was the professional media who within hours found witnesses to the accident confirming the woman was telling the truth.