I've been following the recent events in Iran on Twitter over the past few days, and have learned the following:

1. Twitter is a great way to spread information to large numbers of people, very quickly.
2. Twitter is a great way to spread misinformation to large numbers of people, very quickly.

A couple of examples? Ok.

Exhibit one: #iranelection hash tag is blocked

Early on Tuesday morning, tweets started appearing stating that the #iranelection hash tag was being 'blocked' by the Iranian government. Then, around 7am, this was retweeted by high profile twitterer @stephenfry (among others) and all kinds of craziness broke loose. It was three hours before he made a retraction, but by that time the damage was done - hundreds of Fry's 50,000 followers had retweeted him. It was still being retweeted 24 hours later. Of course, basic fact checking was not done here. From a technical point of view, there is almost no way that anyone could 'block' a hashtag, and logically, why would they bother? They're already blocking Twitter. The only way people in Iran can use Twitter is through a proxy, and that would get around any other blocking anyway.

Exhibit two: BBC website goes green

This one is even more unbelievable. Later on in the morning, @victee tweeted:

The BBC homepage is green in support of Iran!

I guess she'd been to the BBC homepage (which randomly cycles through a range of different colours), happened to catch it on green, and was so excited about it that she just had to tell everyone straight away. This 'exciting news' was retweeted wildly, with everyone heaping praise on the BBC for their solidarity with the people of Iran.

Of course, it's unbelievable that the BBC would do this. One of their great strengths is the fact that they always try to remain scrupulously impartial when it comes to news. It's unimaginable that they would make such a major political statement on their homepage. But hundreds of tweeters didn't think that hard - and presumably, in most cases, didn't even bother to look for themselves - and this too was tweeted hundreds of times over several hours.

The moral of the story?

Unfortunately, people seem to put more value in 'being first with the scoop' than they do in being right. The problem is that once information is out there, it's very difficult (read: impossible) to take it back. So it all comes down to basic journalistic integrity. Do you use twitter? If you do, you're now a journalist. Congratulations. As a journalist, you have a responsibility to think before you publish. Always check your facts before you retweet. Especially if you have 50,000 followers.