My students who read this post are going to laugh because I had a soapbox moment about this in class last week. Here is my current media "thing:" Twitter is a tool used by human beings. It can be used for both good and evil. It can be used with skill and finesse or with ineptitude and incompetence. My concern is that many of us seem to lose our common sense when it comes to evaluating the difference on the social media site.

This matters right now because of last week’s particularly ugly reporting from Boston, relayed on Twitter, that was wrong. Then, yesterday, the Associated Press’ Twitter account was hacked, an erroneous Tweet was posted, and the stock market tanked. In both cases, the information was not a little bit incorrect, not almost-there-but-not-quite. Just plain wrong. And big, reputable, formerly credible news outlets were the ones who were reporting incorrectly.

Not all the mistakes were initially made on Twitter. CNN reported some of their biggest errors initially on air. The New York Post did their damage in print. But both outlets also sent the information to their Twitter feeds and linked back to their main outlets through Twitter.

That means, if you are unfamiliar with how Twitter works, that anyone else could push that information into their own Twitter feeds. And then someone else could take it from that second feed and push into third, fourth and fifth feeds and on into an infinite number of feeds around the world.

Why does it matter who reposts tweets? Because the giant, worldwide game of "telephone" that is the reality of Twitter, allows opinion, misinformation, inadvertent lies and intentional lies fly across the digital universe in seconds with no filters. Ask Eddie Murphy. He’s been pronounced dead on Twitter something like six times. Each time, he emerges, like Mark Twain, to point out that reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated.

There is no question that journalists should know the dangers of reporting early, or questionable, information, especially with the availability of something like Twitter. Those who do so, particularly when they know the information is shaky, are just wrong.

But the rest of us hold some responsibility too. None of us should be forwarding "facts" we can’t find from more than one source. It’s one thing to talk about favorite restaurants on Twitter, or share your love of crazy kitten videos. But if you’re going to play the "telephone" game with hard information, become a fact-seeker rather a Tweet-repeater. Turn yourself into a journalist and attempt to verify information so you don’t become part of the really-bad-info-relay.

In other words: try not to be the one at the end of the line who turns, "City plans to raise property taxes," into "Cindy plays hockey for the masses."