Week 5: News on Twitter

The Evolving Role of News on Twitter and Facebook

While I was aware that a lot of people got some news from things shared on Twitter and Facebook, 63% was a staggering number for me. While I can see some of the advantages that were mentioned and I’m sure are often used in support of a move to include social media platforms in the distribution of news, I also see a lot of things that I find very concerning. 

Twitter’s “Project Lightning” 

So, I’ll start with how this could be a good thing. In theory, this will provide one place that anyone can go for “as-it-happens coverage and commentary on live events.” The possibilities that you have with something like this I think are fantastic. There’s the potential for important events that mainstream news may not be paying enough attention to to be covered in detail by people who are living through the event. 

However, I also see a lot of issues with this project. When it was first mentioned, my first concern was how Twitter planned to handle checking the veracity of the tweets coming in, the sources being used, and the facts behind what people are tweeting if they are going to step in as live news coverage of major events. It’s one thing when news organizations and reporters are tweeting, but this project seems to indicate that it would draw from all sources. 

 In talking about the project in the interview with Buzzfeed, Twitter’s spokesperson says the project will be curated by new employees with “newsroom experience.” They would put out a “visually driven, curated collected of tweets.” This team of editors “will select what it thinks are the best and most relevant tweets and package them into a collection.” He goes on to say that the project is a “beautiful vessel for us to surface great content and to make it more delightful.”  What concerns me is the language he’s using is marketing language: he’s talking about what’s “visually driven,” packaging things, and taking content and “making it more delightful.” The project hasn’t even come out yet and the company is already talking about eventually extending the tool to build curated events for other organizations that don’t meet the standards to make it onto their feed. This presumably would be businesses and, presumably, would be for a price. 

My question is: if their focus is on what’s most visually appealing and how to best package things instead of whether or not they’re presenting factual information or not using equality bias, are they really qualified to be taken seriously as a news source? Obviously this is a bit behind the times as so many people already use Twitter as a news source, but still. On hot button issues, like politics for example, tweets and video of people saying incendiary things that may or (most likely) may not be factually accurate are going to be more “visually appealing” and dramatic than experts who actually know what they’re talking about. 

Another question: Will/Does Twitter hold themselves to journalistic standards and ethics? Facebook certainly doesn’t seem to. When journalists breach ethics, people are outraged, they stop reading or watching – they get angry. Will people stop using Twitter? Would people be as outraged? Would they know who to be outraged at?

Project Lightning: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/twitters-top-secret-project-lightning-revealed#.urlbA1gWy