[enscr]

Twitter is a godsend for unbiased news. In many developing countries, Twitter is playing a very important role of spreading the revolution against incumbents. Granted that it's penetration is a tiny fraction of print & TV media but going forward, it'll be an essential fabric for survival of society.

[dublinben]

What kind of "unbiased" news do you find on Twitter? Its role in revolutions around the world has been greatly overstated by Western journalists and techies.

[insuffi]

I agree with you, but I don't know if you'll agree with me. In my experience, revolutions generally do not generate any sort of unbiased news. As a rule of thumb, it attracts extremist/opposition groups from both sides of the spectrum with their own agendas. Not to mention regular people themselves fall victim to bias.

How much can you really discern about the situation from a few tweets without context?

That's why I think regular investigative journalism should still be the norm.

[enscr]

India is witnessing an arguably revolutionary uprising against crony capitalism, their political nexus, unchecked flow of black money & corruption from top to bottom. The elections in the capital (Dec '13) were a strong indicator of what people want as opposed to what media portrays. Social media played a very important role in bringing a party from inception to near majority in almost a year. That was phenomenal. Now the same party is resource stretched to reach out the masses in the biggest election in the world (at country level). The media has blacked out most of the positive news (for obvious reasons). This is where twitter comes in. It's cementing day to day advancements of a revolution across the country. Unfortunately twitter is still limited to a very tiny fraction of the population.

[mtimjones]

Twitter has been systematically silencing voices on the right that apparently someone in their org disagrees with. Twitter is a political machine, and you'll see it used more and more in this way...

[dredmorbius]

I'd argue "unfiltered" or "less filtered" rather than "unbiased". You're going to get multiple biases, including both the party line and the opposition (either or both of which may have its own distortions).

Sorting out the truth from this is itself a challenge. Economic historian Philip Mirowski has interesting comments on how neoliberals see deliberate distortions of the media as an arguably good thing (Mirowki, and I, disagree with this). Determining credibility (and advertising who is credible) remains a challenge, even with social / decentralized media.

[enscr]

Right. unfiltered is a better generic term. Though I should state that it's unbiased from my perspective when I can trust a source.