Keeping OMGFacts’ tweets in check

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OMGFacts, a wildly popular Twitter feed of unusual tidbits, found itself in a contentious position. The page was designed for posting interesting, factual information, and while most of the content was quite intriguing, some of it simply wasn’t true.

Adorian Deck, the 16-year-old who created the Twitter profile in September, soon found that in order to appease followers and maintain credibility, he would have to put more time into fact-checking what he puts out on his pet project.

The idea for OMGFacts was something of an afterthought for Deck. ‘I didn’t see a lot of these around, so I just made it,’ he said recently during a phone call over Skype, his chat client of choice.

At the time, Deck was focusing a lot of his time on videos he had been posting to YouTube, something he had done since he was 13. Living in a small town outside of Sacramento, the high school student has built up a significant following to his channel page, which now exceeds 31,000 subscribers.

But shortly after he made OMGFacts, Deck won the Twitter lottery. The social network began promoting the page on the suggested users list -- a directory of choice profiles that’s shown to every new user during the sign-up process.

As Deck began to ramp up the number of tweets he posted, he found that verifying whether information was factual or not was more trouble than he anticipated. ‘I just posted things I saw,’ he said. ‘Some of them were wrong.’

The number of people following OMGFacts continued to skyrocket, as did the frequency of criticisms whenever Deck got a fact wrong. So he began punching the so-called facts he found into Google before broadcasting them -- to at least see if they had been mentioned elsewhere on the Internet.

‘There are no cemeteries in San Francisco,’ Deck recalled of one bogus tweet he sent out. ‘That was probably the worst fact that I ever posted.’

Noticing OMGFacts exploding, Emerson Spartz, who likewise became a budding Internet entrepreneur in his teens, contacted Deck. Spartz, his fiance Gabby Montero and his brother Dylan run a network of sites that includes a Harry Potter podcast called MuggleCast and the site GivesMeHope. The latter is a spin off of FMyLife, similar to another optimist dreamland, Life Is Beautiful.

Spartz and Montero contribute to the OMGFacts Twitter page, sharing the responsibility of posting facts for more than 614,000 followers. They also built OMG-Facts.com, an ad-supported website that elaborates on the sub-140-character postings and accepts submissions.

‘We research each one thoroughly -- the majority are, in fact, false -- and post them if they’re true, along with other interesting info we unearth,’ Spartz wrote in an e-mail.

Whereas tweets once took no more than 30 seconds to ‘verify,’ Deck and his cohorts spend 10 to 15 minutes fact-checking each one online.

But even posts that are vetted can get them into trouble, as Deck learned in January on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Deck had posted an accusation about the civil rights leader that, although also reported by other news media, created a firestorm.

‘I felt really bad,’ he said. ‘I hope people, I guess, realize that it wasn’t intentionally like that. I’m not racist or anything.’

Deck continues to help out with OMGFacts, but has gone back to spending more time maintaining his YouTube page, posting a new video every week or so. He created a video channel for OMGFacts. He hopes to study video at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco after he graduates from high school.

-- Mark Milian
twitter.com/markmilian