Blog Post 8: “Evaluation of social media sources”

Blog #8: “Evaluation of social media sources”

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire

• Watch this video to learn how to use Storify to examine social media coverage about your controversy. Storify video
• Use Storify [Sign up for free; You can choose to sign up with your Facebook or Twitter account if you wish] to find 2 more sources for your project. This time, however, you are looking for social media sources about the subject of the controversy.

• Try recycling the search terms you developed in previous blogs...
  and using them in Storify.
• Also, try finding social media items from any of the authors of the general/popular sources you listed in Blog 6 and the authors of the scholarly sources you listed in Blog 7. Try finding social media items posted by any person who is directly quoted in any of those sources, or who are mentioned in those sources because of their relationship to the controversy.

Browse through the first 5-to-6 pages of results for your different searches to get a sense of what kinds of social media sources exist for your project. Create a “Story” in Storify to add interesting search results to.

Out of all the results you add to your “Story,” decide on 2 sources that you feel are the most useful. Now analyze both sources in a short blog post.

Title your blog post “Evaluation of Social Media Sources.” For each source, provide short but detailed answers the questions listed for each category below:

• Credibility - Can you corroborate who the person who posted the social media message is. Can you Google them? Do they belong to an organization or institution that bestows credibility on them (for example, a university, governmental organization, non-profit, company, etc.)?
• Location - Are they in the place they are tweeting or posting about? Are they directly involved with any of the events relevant to your controversy?
• Network - Who is in their network and who follows them? Do other individuals with institutional credibility associate with this person on social media?
• Content - Can the information they’re relying on in their tweet or post be corroborated from other sources?
• Contextual updates - Do they usually post or tweet on this topic? If so, what did past or updated posts say? Do they fill in more details?
• Age - What is the age of the account in question? Be wary of recently created accounts.
• Reliability - Is the source of information reliable?

Source: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/citogenesis.png