 Welcome to Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE.tv and happy Halloween. Today is Wednesday, October 31st, 2012, and I'm Kristen Filetti. New York City is now forced to deal with the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, but as social media continues to weigh in on the destruction, should we really believe every tweet? Join us now with her breaking analysis on social media deception is SiliconANGLE Newsdesk editor, Kristen Nicole. Welcome, Kristen. Hurricane Sandy continued to take a toll on internet infrastructure in New York City and beyond on Tuesday. Can you give us some examples of the disruptions they're experiencing out there? Yeah, storms are always potentially bad for the underlying cables and fiber optic networks that run the internet. And it seems that Hurricane Sandy did have an impact on one of the underwater cables that run across the Atlantic, the AC-2 had had some damage to it over the course of the past few days. Now, which of these would you say is the most significant issue facing them right now? Well, it seems like some of the damage that happened to the infrastructure in the Manhattan area, especially the ones that have impacted server hosting providers, that has a trickle down effect and can impact a lot of websites that run on those servers and the end users that try to access these services and websites are impacted. So is that also which would impact the most customers then? Yeah, it has the widest impact. So when you're impacting a hub like that, that services a broad number of users and consumers and companies alike. The storms putting the true test on major company's disaster recovery procedures in terms of infrastructure. Do you think these companies were as prepared as they could possibly be for Sandy? It certainly seems like certain precautions and steps were taken. If this had happened 10, even five years ago, we probably would have seen more damage and more websites that have gone down and more infrastructure damage that happened in that regard. We've since taken lots of steps towards backup and recovery and rerouting servers and we've kind of learned from past experiences whether can have very great impact on our infrastructure and just like we've learned to reinforce homes and buildings for things like earthquakes and hurricanes. We've also made several improvements to our infrastructure. As reporting on Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath continues, the spotlight on social media is shifting. Over the past few days, YouTube and Twitter have been hailed for providing coverage and useful information to the victims of the storm as well as the general public. However, the slew of misinformation is now coming to light and one Twitter in particular is in the hot seat. The Twitter going by the name of at comfortably smug started the rumor that the New York Stock Exchange was flooded under three feet of water and eventually even CNN was reporting it. What other rumors did he originate? It seems like there were a few. I think one of the wildest was that the Will Smith movie about zombies in New York was coming true, of course with 2012 supposedly being the apocalypse year. Things like that really can get a lot of attention. And see, I think one of the other ones was that the power was going to be preemptively shut off. That one actually turned out to be somewhat true. So that little bit of truth mixed in there, a little bit of speculation, lots of craziness. Smug has since apologized for his actions, but we've heard that there could possibly be criminal charges brought against him for spreading the misinformation. Is that true? And if so, what could they charge him with? And do you think he should be brought up on charges? Yeah, it seems like they're going to go, the legal system is going to pursue this for the spreading of false information. And setting an example with this really, I think the fact that her pain Sandy had such a large impact hit major cities. The center of our economic system, really someone wants to make an example of this case and try to minimize the amount of misinformation that gets spread across the internet. I'm not surprised that they're pursuing legal actions here. We've seen lots of situations like this where someone is posting things publicly on a public forum like Twitter and not necessarily realizing the implications of what they're doing or maybe they are, but it's accessible by the public. And this has added implications as to the impact of the messages that are being spread and the actions that people take because of that information. So when it comes to internet trolls like this that really take advantage of a democratized platform like Twitter, you do want to minimize that type of and discourage that type of activity, but I don't think that even if they are able to prosecute a comfortably smug that it's going to stop internet trolling. Fortunately, social media is also able to right the wrongs just as quickly. In response to the New York Stock Exchange flood rumor, people nearby uploaded photos of the building looking high and dry to dispel the myth. How many of these rumors did you hear and how long was it before you saw corrections to them? There were several rumors that got spread over the course of the past two days in particular and the sad thing about situations like this that can be very dire situations and very stressful on an entire nation is that there's always people that want to take advantage of that fact that lots of people are kind of honing in on one particular news story. We see this with when Osama Bin Laden was killed and caught, people are taking advantage of that spreading malware, spreading false pictures. And some of it is to get attention. Some of it, who knows the reasoning behind some of these things, but when it really comes down to it, the fact that this is a democratized platform also means that the people out there that are really adamant about writing these wrongs and dispelling myths have just as much influence and access and power as the people that spread them. Social media allows for information to be distributed rapidly, but sometimes as we've discussed, the speed of that delivery can backfire, especially when not all of the information is available. Is there a way big data could play a role in organizing social media to make it more comprehensive? There's some ways and there's some companies that are exploring this. And when it comes to the platform itself, something like Twitter or Google, there's pressures from certain organizations that really want Twitter to be responsible for some of this. I don't know if that's necessary, but with the techniques and the technology behind some of the big data systems that we're seeing emerge largely as a result of what's going on with social media platforms like Twitter, there is some ways to kind of sift out the truth from the fiction and organize information in a way that can be beneficial. Of course, real-time analysis is one of the factors here and the better we get at all of this, we can take several things into account from the type of information a person is publishing on the web in the past and the connections that they have throughout social media and some of the actions that they've taken. So this kind of analysis could certainly help. There's probably not any way to solve this or cure this 100%. There's always ways to get around certain systems, but I certainly do think that some big data technology could aid us in that regard. Do you think social media should have more filters or regulations in place to monitor this kind of behavior? Maybe it depends on the type of platform and the type of community that's building around it, but ultimately is the responsibility of the people. I mean, we all have the ability to speak and share and speak our minds, share our thoughts and we have to hold ourselves responsible and ultimately the beauty of something like Twitter is we're able to hold each other responsible. Well, Kristen, thanks so much for your time today and we appreciate you joining us. Thank you. For in-depth coverage on News of the Day and breaking analysis on tech innovation, keep up to date with News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV.