The Post Editorials The state of social media is on all of us
Twitter and Facebook have become the weapons of choice in dirty politics. With all manner of posts, which are too frequently anonymous, easily misleading, and transmitted faster than a communicable disease, activist users of social media have irrevocably degraded the political game, which was never all that clean to begin with.
By now we are all keenly aware that journalists, once the gatekeepers, and slaves to the facts, have been supplanted by anyone who proves capable of using a social media channel. But because any of us now can become brand names and trusted sources, all of us now share the responsibilities of traditional newsrooms. Welcome to the club.
For social media has thrown open the floodgates. The powerful tool of mass communication, once closely held by a few media outlets, is now in the hands of anyone who can build a following — a fairly low barrier to entry to what was once a market held by millionaires.
How to impart the weight of responsibility journalists hold so closely — the abject dread of a correction, or fear of doing more harm than good — to our counterparts with Twitter accounts?
According to a recent study by the American Press Institute and the Associated Press Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago, it matters less who created the content than who shared it on social media.
The story could be from The Denver Post or Denver Guardian (a fake news site) as long as the link comes from a trusted handle: @Oprah (36 million followers), @SenJohnMcCain (2.23 million followers), or @Pontifex (10.5 million).
The good folks at The Media Insight Project put this to the test by presenting tweets from a variety of usernames for the same content. It made no difference whether the link in the tweet went to The Big Story by the Associated Press or to a non-existent DailyNewsReview.com, as long as the reader “trusted” the tweeter.
That is simultaneously good and bad news.
For example @nytimes has almost as many followers as @Oprah — almost. Those of us, who truly believe journalists strive to be impartial arbiters of good public policy regardless of politics, pray tweets from organizations like @denverpost carry at least the weight of celebrities and athletes.
But the bad news is the president of the United States, who has amassed 26.9 million followers, doesn’t seem beholden to fact, and his handle now carries the weight of what should be the most trusted source of information on earth.
If the Media Insight Project tells us anything, it’s that the burden that once rested on the shoulders of journalists to get the facts right and minimize harm, now rests on the shoulders of everyone with a social media account. The decision to share, to retweet and promote should be a weighty one for news outlets, the rich and famous, politicians, and everyone else, too.
We can’t undo this creation of social media, nor should we shy away from something that is such an amazing tool of information dissemination, mobilization and connection.
But with the shared power of social media comes the shared responsibility of being a source for news and information. We call for everyone to exercise more care on this platform, to unfollow those who prove disreputable, defriend those who waste your time with click bait, and to instead reward the truth and hard work that shines in other sources.