Evaluation of Social Media Sources

MacEntee, Sean "social media" 11/26/10 via Flickr
Attribution 2.0 Generic

I used Storify to isolate some social media buzz about the General Motors ignition switch recalls. For some reason, Storify failed to return results more than a month old so I was forced to pick from fewer results than I would have liked. However, I did manage to find an account that has created an art car out of a recalled Chevy Cobalt in protest to the mishandling of the recalls and has been consistently sharing and writing about the recalls.

GM Recall News: GM refuses 91% of faulty ignition switch claims: Dear @GM thank you for the recall notice. We ... http://t.co/67YUENXaLn

— Deathtrap Art Car (@DeathTrapArtCar) August 25, 2015

GM Recall News: Judge reverses Penn Hills woman's manslaughter conviction due to GM ignition: "I'm aggravated ... http://t.co/BCs7Y3Podf

— Deathtrap Art Car (@DeathTrapArtCar) August 27, 2015

This Twitter account appears to be credible as it is essentially a protest of General Motors' poor handling of the situation. The account is based out of San Diego, CA which is not particularly close to Detroit which is the center of the controversy but as it has been liberally and accurately reported by online automotive news outlets, I believe the location does not particularly adversely. I could not find anyone I know in their follower list. They post about the topic on average once a day as that is the entire purpose of the account. The posts are easily corroborated as they include outside links and are about a widely covered controversy. The account has been in existence since the end of January of 2015 and the information appears to be reliable though there is a justified anti-GM voice.

As Storify could not find much that was older than the beginning of July, I continued my search on open Twitter based on the #gmrecall and found this:

@mtbarra answer this. What if 1 of the #GmRecall Crash victims was ur Son? Would u stand up and Lie/Coverup for #Gm? What? NO? Thn y u lie?

— 1984 (@1984cdn) July 9, 2015

1984's Twitter account seems to be much less reliable than Deathtrap Art Car's. The first tip-off to this is the misspellings, random capitalization, and grammatical errors. We'll see how the rest of this analysis goes. 1984's stated location is "all over Canada" which appears somewhat unreliable however it is important to know that Canada is a large consumer as well as a large producer of General Motors cars. The most significant follower I can find here is @Bloodhound_SSC which is the official Twitter for the Bloodhound land speed record attempt which does hold some weight though I'm not precisely sure why they would be following 1984. General information about the recalls is easy to find however this particular tweet appears to be more of a personal attack so there is nothing to corroborate here. Though this account has only been active since August 20, it has already tweeted more than 3000 times. 1984 does tweet about GM often but it seems to be in general an unreliable Twitter account.