Twitter is clearly emerging as a potent news source, but the power of it as a social networking and information – or misinformation - tool has never been illustrated as well as this week.

According to Nielsen Online, Twitter mentions of the swine flu are happening at a rate of one per second. (Looks as if that rate has gone up since the Nielsen story a few days ago. This morning I logged onto Twitter and searched for “swine flu.” I counted 14 seconds before this message came up: “63 more results since you started.”)

The ability to dispense so much information (albeit 140 characters at a time) and at that speed is full of so much possibility for education and public action. The Centers for Disease Control (CDCemergency and CDC_eHealth), for instance, is using Twitter to pass on information about the swine flu. And it has tens of thousands of followers.

The problem, as anyone who uses Twitter has probably already guessed: Not all information is reliable and some of it has the potential for causing panic, perhaps not intentionally, perhaps intentionally.

NPR has an interesting article on this topic. It points out: If you were to believe what you read through Twitter, you wouldn’t be eating pork, and you’d be pretty well hooked on a conspiracy theory.

And even if there wasn’t bad information, there’s this question: If you read the same precautions and warnings repeated at a mind-numbing frequency how inflated is your sense of panic? How much are you overestimating the threat? How out of whack is your sense of reality?

As a former journalist, I love the opportunities of social networking and a 24-hour news cycle, but clearly the swine flu business is showing us we need to keep an eye out for the pitfalls as well.