Twitter and other social networking sites are quickly becoming the fastest way for information to travel. With more and more people using social networking sites, and visiting them more frequently information travels around the world quicker than it used to get across town. Information about natural disasters traveling across networks such as Twitter and Facebook has become a major news story topic. Twitter is able to gain information faster than the online news websites.
Social networking sites are able to post so much information quickly largely because the information comes directly from first hand sources. These witnesses post their thoughts, and observations about the incident to be read usually by family and friends. Because the information comes directly from the witnesses there are positive and negative aspects. The information is unbiased in the way that it has not been edited. No one external to the incident has chosen what is important information. However, this lack of editing brings in personal biases and allows for extreme misinformation. One needs to be a more critical reader when using information gathered from a social media site than a reputable news site. The information gathered from social networking sites requires searching for it will not be presented in a neat clean format as found on a news site. News gathered from social networking sites also tends to be more personalized than news sites. One receives threads from family members and friends who usually live nearby. This means that the information will most likely be relevant to you either geographically or socially.
Twitter has been credited with having the first reports for many natural disasters. One of which is the Southern California earthquake that struck on July 29, 2008. The first post on the subject is credited a one Caroline (Vixy) who posted “earthquake.” Other posts followed on several sites. Posts from TaffUpTopPro, “Did anyone else feel the 2.9 earthquake in Fountaion Valley & Costa Mesa Earthquake r cool as long as they Dnt wake me up at 6am. “Elener posted, “RT @extratv:Celebs Tweet: 6.9 Earthquake Hits Baja Californian http://su.pr/1h8PB2." These tweets and posts do inform people about natural disasters, however, as they are not edited they can not be held as completely reliable. Social Networking sites can be used to gather data, but one should be careful about how much credit and faith they put on posts.