"Journalists need to be very careful about the way that they're actually propagating these embedded tweets. That's how 90 per cent of the population is seeing this sort of stuff," she said.

"My plea is not to get rid of the ordinary people, I think that's deeply important. But we should make sure that they're ordinary, and that they're people."

Using vox populi has always been a challenging thing, Tworek said, even when it came into widespread use in television news following the Second World War, where TV anchors would venture out to the street to ask people their opinions.

But it's important to remember that vox pops were never meant to be authoritative on a subject. "It's a tool of illustration, not of research," she said, citing old BBC guidelines. "And I'd add that it's not a tool of research or representation."

If journalists—or regular users—want to see whether a tweet actually comes from a real person, Tworek recommends using a service called botometer, developed by researchers at Indiana University. It will help identify whether a Twitter account actually represents to a real person.

And before putting a tweet into print or on the air, journalists can use a tried and true method of verifying someone's identity: the phone.

"Put in that extra five-to-ten minutes of effort just to check that somebody really is who they say they are."