Mis-tweet

v. To use Twitter to mislead your followers.

For providing false and misleading information, a 30-second TV spot crafted by a seasoned media consultant is still king. But there’s another medium this campaign year that makes the content of a TV ad seem like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. We’re talking about Twitter. By design, Twitter limits communication. It provides its users with 140 characters to make a point – enabling them to oversimplify and exaggerate. In politics, this is considered an asset, and both parties have taken to the social networking site that now claims to have more than 100 million users.

FactCheck.org found several examples of tweets in the past several days from both parties that misinform their followers, from reinforcing misperceptions about their opponents to making flat out false claims. In one tweet, the National Republican Congressional Committee blamed a plant closing in California on the new health care law. That’s not true. And neither is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s tweet that accused a Republican House candidate of promising to "privatize" Social Security in order to secure an endorsement.

For some examples, read on. And feel free to RT this article.