ReTweeting: Attribution for Discovery versus Attribution for Creation

During the past few months, I have found myself consuming more news and articles via recommendations from friends and those I follow on Twitter than via traditional source-based subscription (e.g. subscribing to specific feeds or newspapers). Social media discovery is here, and the best part of reTweeted links is that they have already gone through a round of peer review by peers I trust.

Often, I’m tempted to reTweet that content myself, or post it to Facebook, or share it via Google Reader. A few of these media keep attribution intact (e.g. Google Reader adds the “Shared by” metadata for each person in the chain that shared the content.) Others such as Twitter are restricted by the length of the post, so the “RT @” list quickly gets too long and inevitably gets trimmed along the way.

But there’s no accepted practice for how this list should be trimmed. Should you keep the first Tweeter, even if that person is not the author of the content? (E.g. someone who read an NY Times article and tweeted about it.) Should you keep the last reTweeter, who was your direct link to the content in question? What about multiple Tweeters re-posting links to the same content, so it’s not a tree any more, but a forest of links (imagine a directed graph with edges denoting “shared by X to Y”).

The problem is that by including attribution about the process of discovery, we end up attaching higher value to discovery than creation. When someone reTweets a secondary source of information, attribution for the primary source is often trimmed away. This is especially bad for Creative Commons works that require attribution when re-posted, but is bad in general for any kind of work and for authors of that work.

I have come to the conclusion that although attribution for discovery is important, it’s hard to apply consistently in fixed-character-length media. It’s a completely different story in case of original content generated by the tweeter himself/herself: e.g. one-liners, or authors tweeting links to their (longer) content. Attribution for original content is vastly more meaningful than attribution for promoting someone else’s content (although the value of that act is substantial as well.)

So from now on, I will only attribute original content in my tweets and Facebook updates. My intention is not to discount the value of the source that shared the content with me, but instead to promote the original author of that content wherever possible.