The Dangers of Unmoderated Twitter Feeds

By Kev Strong | June 23, 2011 at 10:07 am | No comments | Social Media

With the ability to share our pictures to the internet in an instant via Twitter, Facebook etc through services such as Flickr, YFrog and Twitpic, it’s of no surprise that people are sharing their experiences of live music and events.

With the start of summer solstice came the Glastonbury festival. To most people who attend Glastonbury that means mud, music and more mud. Naturally people want to share their experiences online and a service called GlastoBuzz was set up to allow people attending Glastonbury to be able to do just this – Only they decided to do it through an unmoderated API call.

How GlastoBuzz works

They searched twitter for any mention of #glasto and any URL that was posted that came from Yfrog.com or Twitpic.com.  These images were then replicated on their gallery page without any moderation resulting in the following test showing up:

This shows the dangers of unmoderated feeds where the public have the ability to input messages directly.  GlastoBuzz should probably fix this quickly.