Except that the bigger twitter gets the more noise there is, and the more value there is in gaming it. For example, there's nothing to stop me from twittering "

Except that the bigger twitter gets the more noise there is, and the more value there is in gaming it. For example, there's nothing to stop me from twittering "earthquake in Canada" right now - you might unfollow me after finding out it's not true, but others might echo it on down the chain. Even more plausibly, I could have twittered that I was in a plane at LAX after I saw the first twitter messages, even though I'm 3k miles away. How would you know? I could probably give a vivid description of being in a just-landed plane in the midst of an earthquake. An example is that a journalist interviewed a woman who twittered that her OB-GYN was in her vagina when the earthquake happened - it's a nice vivid detail, but how do we know it's actually true?