Using Social Media

Key Takeaways:

• Many sites treat “friend-only” Facebook profile material as private information. Most treat tweets as public statements.

• Editors need to consider that reports in social media are often unverified.

• Twitter can be a forum for fast story feedback, information vetting, and ethical debate.

Twitter puts everyone and every conversation in the spotlight

Here in San Diego, everyone – from political leaders to labor leaders to business and the Republican party head, and the chief of police’s lawyer, and the head of the taxpayers association, and then all of the reporters in town – people have all been very engaged on Twitter. The ethics breaches in journalism — not citing an original report about an issue, lack of disclosure, corrections – are all getting vetted on Twitter here. Sources are using it as a way to hold journalists accountable and vice versa. Everybody in town has their feed going as they’re watching each other argue.

It’s snipey and unproductive in many areas, and it’s gotten to the point where we’ve had to talk about turning the cheek on a lot of things. On the other hand it’s also an incredibly effective tool, and I think it’s actually corrected journalism here in a way unlike anything I’ve seen before. You know, you didn’t cite us in this, even though you did that. Or, are you sure about this figure, where did you get that figure? Or, a graph will be off and we’ll get a correction request about it through Twitter from the graphics editor at the Union-Tribune.

It’s this marketplace of vetting of each other’s content and ethics that I’ve never imagined before. And it’s through this medium that a lot of these arguments and accusations have come out in the last two or three years.

It’s not organized. It’s very random. At the beginning, there was the notion that Twitter wasn’t a very serious medium. But you’re writing, and it’s public, and you hold a public position – it’s a big deal. I think we’ve gotten over that now, everyone takes it very seriously and watches what they say a little better.

Then, just the other day, I was arguing with a labor leader about a plan to regulate Walmart here. We’d run ads from Walmart several weeks ago. And she said, you can continue to split hairs if you want because of all the money you took – something like that. Ouch! That’s quite an accusation.

How often have editors gotten complaints or concerns about accuracy and just sort of let it be? Now, you let it be and you’re in the spotlight.

There was a city councilman the other day, a very mild-mannered nice guy, who wrote on Twitter that a KPBS story, the local public radio, was ludicrous and offensively wrong, or something like that. They had it out on Twitter for a while.

How often have editors gotten complaints or concerns about accuracy and just sort of let it be? Now, you let it be and you’re in the spotlight.

How often have editors gotten complaints or concerns about accuracy and just sort of let it be? Now, you let it be and you’re in the spotlight.

Facebook comments aren’t always public

I won’t use images from Facebook unless I have someone’s specific permission. I tend to assume that everything is copyright or it belongs to somebody on websites, whether it’s Facebook or your own personal site or a company site or whatever, unless permission is obtained. It’s a line that few seem to be holding any more, but as long as I can I will. In terms of quoting people, that’s a little bit different. If there’s something that’s a matter of public safety, I might say, well, they posted on their Facebook page, they said they’re gonna kill somebody, or something like that.

For example, we had a case where a gentleman was arrested after an incident where he was apparently, allegedly trying to commit “suicide by cop.” Someone pointed me to his Facebook page the next day, and it had some rantings – it was clear that he was probably mentally disturbed. And I could have chosen to say, well, here’s an interesting story about how this guy that just got involved in this incident, was definitely seemingly not in his right mind, and mentioned that. And I thought, you know what? To me this is personal, it’s not just sitting out there on the open web, I really had to be pointed by someone to the unique name that this guy used on his Facebook page. It just doesn’t seem like it’s open season on all that until and unless it’s written in the Facebook terms of service or something that everything that’s published here is free and open unless you hide it behind a privacy wall.

If I’m going to quote a tweet, I will pull its discrete URL and link to it.

Verify everything

I don’t run anything that I can’t verify. A couple of years ago, my daughter had heard something via Facebook that one of the students from the high school had gotten hurt somehow. And unless I could get a verification I wouldn’t run any of that.

The public view

In our shop, we had clear rules: It was fair game if you could access their page without being their friend.

In our shop, we had clear rules: It was fair game if you could access their page without being their friend. If it was in question, the reporter would log out from Facebook, and if the page was hidden from them, then they couldn’t use it. At least without some further confirmation. As far as picking up stuff from other sources and taking it as accurate, we really use our judgment. If it was a trusted source and was not going to harm anyone, we would take it at face value.

A complicated case

Columbia Journalism School did a whole case study of our use of information from Facebook in covering the Annie Le murder case in 2009.

That gave Bailey access to the ex-girlfriend’s status updates and she discovered the suspect was involved in a police investigation years before. It also left Bailey and Bass in an ethical conundrum about what information to publish and how to maintain the ex-girlfriend’s privacy. In the end, they waited on reporting some facts.

Bailey wrote up her perspective in Slate.]

‘Disinformation’ can still seep in

Verifying whether something is news, is true, is typically fairly easy, or it’s not high-stakes enough. You know, whether the Chicago Transit Authority train is stuck somewhere on the tracks, I’m not going to call the CTA to check on that. If somebody has said that, the stakes are so low in that being untrue, why would somebody bother to lie? But it’s also something we may want to report — at rush hour it might be helpful for people. The beauty of the web is you can post an update if things change.

Even when you verify things, you can end up getting disinformation.

Even when you verify things, you can end up getting disinformation. There was a case recently where a well-loved bar owner was believed to have died. It had come through a reliable news source. Somebody called the bar to verify if it was true, and the manager on duty said it wasn’t. Two days later it turned out she was just covering for the family because they didn’t want the news out yet.

Trust but verify

On many occasions, our social-media monitoring has produced stories. And there have also been at least three or four occasions in which we waited to good effect. A television station here tweeted that there was a shooting at a nuclear reactor on campus. They tweeted. Our instant reaction was to put it up, to tweet it on our site, put up a news burst. But the city editor – one of our editor/professor types – said wait, let’s confirm it. Turned out there was a shooting in the neighborhood, but it had nothing to do with the nuclear site. That’s our trust-but-verify approach.

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