Earlier this year, news outlets and journalists alike immediately pounced on a viral video from Twitter that showed several Covington Catholic High School students on the National Mall. According to the initial narrative, they were harassing an older Native American demonstrator.
By the time a full hour-and-a-half long video was released clearing the names of the students involved, the internet had already circulated the shorter video, making the world believe, if only briefly, that those kids with their “Make America Great Again” hats were racists, bigots, and bullies.
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According to a study from the American Press Institute, “9 in 10 Twitter users, or 86%, say they use Twitter for news.” In 2015, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey tweeted his thanks to journalists for making Twitter a news site: “Journalists were a big part of why we grew so quickly and still a big reason why people use Twitter: news. It’s a natural fit.”
And yes, Twitter has proven to be revolutionary for news consumption. Yet, as tempting as it is to treat it as a true crowd-sourced news-gathering organization, it is far from that. And it isn’t getting any closer, either.
In fact, instead of Twitter becoming more like cautious, fact-checked, edited, and curated journalistic sources of information, the journalists and their outlets are instead coming more to resemble Twitter’s unchecked Wild West of rumors and dangerous half-truths.
In May 2018, C-SPAN tweeted a short video of President Trump that purported to show him calling immigrants “animals” and “not people.” The video was quickly taken up and tweeted about by major news organizations such as the Associated Press. Boy, were they wrong. The Associated Press later informed readers that its tweet had been removed, stating that the video misrepresented Trump’s comments: he was actually referring to members of the notorious international criminal gang, MS-13, who are known for hacking victims to death with machetes. Trump was boasting in the clip about his administration’s removal of MS-13 members from the United States.
And then it gets worse. Fast forward to April 5, 2019. A random person on Twitter named Mark Elliott retweeted the exact same video, but framing it as if it were new footage taken in the context of recent debates over asylum-seekers. Elliott commented in his year-late retweet that Trump had just said this of “people asking for asylum.” And guess what? Big-time journalists, including the New York Times’ Glenn Trush and CNN’s Manu Raju, were among the tens of thousands of people who retweeted him! Not only did they apparently forget watching the same video a year earlier, but they also repeated the same mistake of taking Trump’s words about gang members out of context.
The problem with Twitter as news — and with the journalists who use Twitter to do their reporting and air their opinions — is that news on Twitter is frequently untrustworthy. What makes it worse is that journalists and news organizations rely on Twitter for current information as it updates so quickly, and there is no reason to think it reliable.
This effect has been not only observed but tested. The Columbia Journalism Review recently reported on a study that asked heavy-Twitter-using journalists to rank a series of AP news headlines by newsworthiness. The catch: They were shown some of the headlines on AP’s website, and others in the form of anonymous tweets. “Journalists who said they spend a lot of time on Twitter and rely on it for their work ranked the anonymous tweets as high or higher than AP stories (this effect declined the longer a journalist had been working in the industry).”
There are some arguments in favor of Twitter use by journalists. Twitter does broaden the range of sources and may perhaps help uncover truth in some circumstances. However, journalists have started to rely so heavily on Twitter that they’ve started to think of it subconsciously as fact. The mainstream news sources don’t help this practice, as we’ve already seen with both the Covington Catholic story and Trump’s comments on MS-13 — and there are easily thousands of similar cases. Even if social media has beneficial effects in spreading good stories, it has been proven in real life to lead to hastier and less accurate posts and responses based on unreliable sources of information.
Without paying attention to their craft and instead relying on agenda-laden Twitter accounts — which are sometimes anonymous, or fake, or part of foreign disinformation campaigns — journalists are spreading confusion, miscommunication, and slander, with disastrous consequences for their victims and possibly for their news organizations.
This brings to light a major ethical question to the trend in journalism. What happened to the ethic of doing reporting outside the office? Of requiring multiple sources for a story even to run? That era is gone, in favor of however one that prizes a story for the number of retweets it gets. Journalists, in their desperation to keep traffic on both their newspaper’s website and on their own Twitter accounts, are tempted to hastily post and respond to events that may be misrepresented.
The problem with this is that Twitter isn’t real life, and any reporting that’s based on it won’t often be real news, either.
Annie Brown is a journalism student at Asbury University.
