For football fans in Europe, 31 August was one of the most exciting days in the season, as it was the last day of the so-called ‘transfer window’. Professional football clubs are only allowed to transfer players who are under contract within the periods specified by football’s European governing body UEFA.

As a fan of English football I had a tab open in my browser all day to monitor the websites that reported on the day’s developments. But there was something noticeably different about the way some of these sites were operating compared to a few years ago. Instead of just relying on reports from reliable and trusted sources, they were also publishing messages received via Twitter, even from anonymous users.

False information
The majority of those tweets turned out to be completely wrong. I have no doubt that some people genuinely believed that they had seen a certain player walking into a club with his agent, but equally I’m convinced that there were some mischief makers out there who were tweeting inaccurate information to wind up friends who supported a different club.

The problem with using Twitter is that anyone can see your message, even a professional journalist looking for a scoop over his/her rivals. So some of the tweets that were meant as wind-ups for friends ended up on the Web pages of normally reliable organisations. There was so much information on these pages that it was difficult to distinguish the frivolous tweets from the information supplied by reliable sources.

Two plus two = five
An example of the way a tweet can be misinterpreted concerns Ajax defender Gregory van der Wiel. On Saturday 27 August he tweeted that he was on the plane to London, but didn’t give a reason. That’s a problem with Twitter – tweets have to be very short, so they often become cryptic. When this information reached the sports desks of some English newspapers, some journalists remembered that Chelsea had previously expressed an interest in signing him, and resurrected that story.

In fact Ajax had, unusually, played a league match on Friday evening, so he took the opportunity to go to London for the weekend. But the newspapers reported that a deal with Chelsea was on the cards, much to the bemusement of Van der Wiel and the two clubs.

Gaddafi rumours
In this case, no serious harm was done. The football world is constantly full of rumours and speculation. But in some contexts, operating this way can be dangerous. For example the situation in Libya, where Internet access was recently restored, is such that rumours and speculation abound about the whereabouts of Muammar Gaddafi and some of his sons.

It would be quite easy for supporters of Gaddafi – and there are certainly some still active in Libya – to deliberately spread misinformation about his whereabouts in order to confuse ‘the enemy’. Indeed, there’s strong evidence suggesting that’s precisely what has happened in recent days.

Use responsibly
In my opinion, the use of social networking tools, and even ordinary emails, by organisations that wish to be regarded as authoritative, is in danger of getting out of hand. A journalist’s task is to follow up leads by checking the veracity of information carried on social networking sites, not to simply copy and paste it on the off chance that it’s true. Failure to apply normal journalistic standards to unverified sources will, I fear, lead to a lowering of public confidence in the overall output of the organisation.

I am not against the use of social networking. RNW uses Facebook and Twitter very successfully, and we receive a lot of valuable feedback that way. But mixing unverified rumours with properly researched information on one page, and leaving it up to the reader to decide what to believe, is an unsatisfactory way of using social networking. I hope that, when journalists have collectively had more experience of these tools, there will be a better understanding of how to use them without compromising the integrity of the main product.