Another thing that bother’s me is that people don’t bother to verify the link/information in the tweet, they just retweet it ‘blindly’ and so I’ve seen false rumours spread like wildfire.

Retweeting can be a great way to spread information - letting the twitter community know about worthy causes or valuable info. But so often it is misused badly, which is a shame as it is giving twitter a bad name - as seen with the over-retweeting of Swine Flu rumours.

There are people who over-do it to, retweeting every link etc.. but hardly posting any tweets themselves - which is annoying in itself, as they are basically regurgitating other people’s tweets while barely letting their own voice be heard.

All in all - I guess I’m still undecided about retweeting.

I experienced this the other day - someone retweeting something I’d posted on Twitter and adding their comment to the end, so it looked like I’d said it.

It didn’t totally distort what I’d originally said, but I felt it added an unwelcome spin that I wouldn’t have given it myself.

I pointed it out, but I didn’t go so far as to ask for the tweet to be deleted - mainly because my original is in my stream for all to see.

Unfortunately, with things like Twitter, there is a kind of ‘law of the jungle’ that applies - and most people understand these unwritten rules and abide by them. But, because there aren’t actually any stated rules or guidelines, and people sometimes don’t figure the unofficial etiquette out for themselves, using this medium does carry these risks.

I don’t really know if there’s much organisations can do about this kind of thing - apart from ask, politely, for any misleading messages to be deleted - because, as unambiguous as you think your original may be, it’s always going to be open to interpretation.

The good thing about Twitter is that you can always point people to your - accurate - original, or they can find it and cross-reference themselves.

If you are tweeting campaign messages that you specifically want to be retweeted, I would recommend leaving some characters spare, to allow people to retweet without editing your original.

Perhaps I should stop using all 140 characters to allow room to RT?