FIVE journalists will lock themselves away in a French farmhouse with access only to Facebook and Twitter to test the quality of news from the social networking and micro-blogging sites.

Twitter and Facebook's use as news-breaking tools has been highlighted over the past year, particularly during opposition protests in Iran that many media described as a "twitterised revolution".



This month, Twitter played a key communications role in quake-hit Haiti, with users sending harrowing personal accounts, heart-rending pictures and cries for help.



But how will the world look if viewed only through the prism of these sites, whose phenomenal growth has been fuelled by smartphones and, for Twitter, online bursts of 140 characters?



Are these social media - which between them have nearly 400 million users - really the serious threat to established media they are often said to be?



Those are the questions the five reporters hope to answer when they retire for five days from February 1 to a farmhouse in France's southern Perigord region.



Cut off



They will be relieved of their smartphones and be given mobiles that cannot connect to the internet, and be reminded television, radio and newspapers are banned.



"We will give them five computers with blank hard drives," said Francoise Dost of the RFP French-language public broadcasters association, which organised the event.



"They have agreed to be linked to the outside world only through Twitter and Facebook. No web surfing is allowed," Mr Dost said.



The young guinea pigs from Canadian, French, Belgian and Swiss radio stations will go on the air on their channels to comment on news they have found.



"This experiment will enable us to take a hard look at all the myths that exist about Facebook and Twitter," said Helene Jouan, a senior editor at participating station France Inter.



"Our aim is to show that there are different sources of information and to look at the legitimacy of each of these sources," she said.



Nour-Eddine Zidane, France Inter's guinea pig in the experiment, regularly uses Facebook and Twitter.



"I use them for two different functions. Facebook is for friends, and Twitter I use as an alert system, because you must always be careful about it," he said.



He said the death of a senior French politician, Philippe Seguin, was recently first made public on Twitter, but pointed out a tweet about a computer meltdown in French post offices quickly proved false.



Such hoaxes are common on Twitter and Facebook, with one this week saying US airlines were flying doctors and nurses to Haiti free of charge to help with relief efforts.



Reputable media organisations check such stories by phoning the parties involved or consulting other sources, such as their reporters, news agencies or online media.



But trying to sort the wheat from the chaff without access to these other sources will be difficult for the four men and one woman.



They will be telling how they manage - or fail - on the airwaves and in a communal blog.