Evaluation of Social Media Sources

In this post I have found two comments by people on social media (ie., Facebook, Twitter).  I will evaluate these sources based on several questions.

Lonaug, Marlon. "Facebook". Uploaded April 5, 2015 via pixabay. Public Domain.

Facebook Comments

Alex Kinney: "We've abandoned plenty of elegant theories in the past because experiment demonstrated that they didn't describe the way nature actually was. And what is "sufficiently elegant"? If we'd accepted an idea like this at an earlier point in history, we might all still believe in the ether. This is a not even wrong way to do science."

• Credibility: They do not belong to an organization that bestows credibility on them, nor do they have the education to back up their claims that is visible.                                                              
• Location: He is not directly involved in the controversy. My bet is that he read the title and the first paragraph and from that made assumptions about the entire article then formed his own opinion.                                                                                                                                                     
• Network: The majority of his friends and followers are undergraduates or graduate level students who are not in the field of physics, but instead are in the humanities.                              
• Content: In the above quote, he does mention the ether which means he knows what hes talking about, however the majority of his post is his own opinion and questions.                          
• Contextual Updates: The majority of his posts are about politics and gender equality. Although there are some posts relating to science, none of them are physics related.                         
• Age: The age of the account is over 6 years old meaning it is fairly reliable and not a spam account                                                                                                                                                   
• Reliability: Overall the reliability of this source as an opinion is valid and reliable. While he does provide a specific example to back up his knowledge, he still fails to cite anything specific

More Facebook Comments

Earl Crosby: "Common scientists sound more and more like a mystery theatre troupe than they do scientists. 
It's been sad to watch science devolve simply because they don't want to admit being wrong about a lot of things... for some odd reason."

• Credibility: The credibility of this source does not hold because he works at Carl's Jr. and does not appear to have a degree in any science.                                                                                          
• Location: He does not appear to be directly involved in the event because he is only posting a comment on a second hand source media that does not have a connection to the original document.                                                                                                                                                
• Network: This person associates with non college graduates and lacks any connection to people with degrees in physics.                                                                                                         
• Content: He provides no content which can be backed up with research or other things resulting in lack of credibility.                                                                                                                               
• Contextual Updates: He does not usually post about things like this. He typically posts about politics and controversial topics.                                                                                                           
• Age: The age of the account is fairly old and he posts often meaning he is not just a spam account.                                                                                                                                             
• Reliability: The reliability of this source to provide any credible information is lacking.  However as a response to this controversy, this is just reliable enough because of the public opinion poll this kind of comment offers.