I predict we’ll see more social media posts in news stories — but still without the necessary verification of who their authors really are.
Social media posts increasingly make their way into news stories as sources — a new vox pop — representing public opinion on everything from celebrity drama to presidential debate performances. A recent study suggests that the use of social media content in the news has nearly doubled over the past five years. These posts come overwhelmingly from Twitter, even though less than a quarter of U.S. adults use the platform.
Including social media posts in stories as representations of public opinion offers at least the possibility to cast the American public as the protagonist in news stories, as Danna Young called for in her prediction last year. Unfortunately, my research suggests that for now, social media posts are mostly used in political news to further propagate the game frame.
Previous predictions have called for an increase in automated fact-checking, but we also need to automate social media verification. Unfortunately, we’re nowhere near that. The first step is to integrate social media verification at all.
I’ve interviewed journalists about their use of social media posts from the public in news stories. Journalists told me they select posts based on alerts from DataMinr, by following hashtags, or even after seeing them pop up on their own Twitter timelines. None of them mentioned verifying the authenticity of the post before incorporating it into their reporting. Given the outsized attention that some journalists pay to Twitter when determining what’s newsworthy, I see little reason to think that the use of tweets in news stories will decline in 2019.
I’m not contending that journalists skip verification on social media posts out of laziness. My suspicion is that journalists think of tweets as content, not as sources.
When journalists cover tweets from the president — as they often do — they almost always fact-check the claims Trump makes in his tweets. The same must go for social media posts from the public. The authenticity of their account must be verified, and the veracity of their claim (if it’s not straight opinion) must be established.
Verification would also work to mitigate the risk of news outlets embedding social media posts from bots, trolls, or other streams of manipulation into their stories. Tweets from what are now known Russian troll accounts found their way into news stories in major outlets like The Washington Post, USA Today, BuzzFeed, and Vox. This is an opening that can be exploited, as Nick Diakopoulos pointed out in his prediction last year.
Since embedding tweets straight from Russian propaganda accounts didn’t seem to prompt newsrooms to institute verification procedures, I predict 2019 will bring more news stories that unintentionally amplify malicious misinformation. At a time when the press and journalists are under attack and trust in news is at an all-time low, it should go without saying that these verification steps are vital.
We obviously can’t rely on platforms like Facebook or Twitter to validate the authenticity of accounts, nor can journalists expect to rely on them for data to do so on their own. As a first step, journalists should incorporate standard verification procedures into the social media reporting process by at least attempting to contact users, verify their authenticity, and perhaps even seek permission to use their posts in news stories.
Once journalists begin to do this, we can learn what the process of social media verification looks like. Only then can productive partnerships between news outlets, journalists, journalism researchers, and computer scientists be forged to address the problem of social media verification at scale. I hope that if my prediction comes true, it will shepherd in much-needed collaboration on solving the social media verification problem.
Shannon McGregor is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Utah.
Manoush Zomorodi Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness
Masuma Ahuja Make foreign coverage less foreign
Rick Berke The year of loyalty
Justin Kosslyn Text hits a tipping point
Lauren Katz Community becomes a core newsroom value
Craig Newmark The end of “loudspeakers for liars”
Jonas Kaiser Catching up with “Neuland”
Chase Davis We can acknowledge what we don’t know
Moreno Cruz Osório Damaged credibility and a new threat in Brazil
Hossein Derakhshan The news is dying, but journalism will not — and should not
Ståle Grut A new dawn for 3D tech in journalism
Claire Wardle Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces
Matthew Pressman The battle over objectivity intensifies
Heather Chaplin Agree we’re partisan — for the democratic system
Elva Ramirez News — but make it cinematic
Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau A more sincere definition of “community”
Jack Riley Facebook refugees, from ad revenue to news habits
P. Kim Bui The misfits become the bosses
Robin Kwong Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”
Geetika Rudra The year of actionable (local) journalism
Zainab Khan Publishers whose products can stand up to social media giants will win
Tshepo Tshabalala Ahead of African elections, unlock partnerships with fact-checkers
Simon Rogers Data journalism becomes a global field
Millie Tran There is no magic — you’ve got this
Don Day Timewalls and other reader revenue experiments
Frank Mungeam Tonight at 11: News, sports, and climate change
Peter Bale Venture capital runs out of patience
Mario García The rise of content “pilots”
Tushar Banerjee Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising
Elisabeth Goodridge Yes, they signed up — but our job’s not over
Knight Foundation A year of local collaboration
Matt Skibinski Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers
Zizi Papacharissi Old interface, say hello to the new interface
Mariana Moura Santos From pageviews to impact
Carl Bialik Fatigued news consumers will pay more for less news
Jesse Holcomb We’ll get better at making the case for local journalism
Stefanie Murray Local news wakes up and starts collaborating
Frank Chimero Leave the phone at home and put news on your wrist
Amy King We should listen to the kids (especially on Instagram)
M. Scott Havens Time to swing for the fences
Bill Adair Another year fighting Trump’s falsehoods
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Readers are only getting started
Salem Solomon Correcting our corrections
Axie Navas The traffic hunt, CMS battle, and magazine identity crises loom
Talia Stroud Engaging people across lines of difference
Rishad Patel A design system for responsible publishing
Adam Thomas In Europe, foundations invest in news
A.J. Bauer The coming splintering of conservative media
Jean Friedman Rudovsky Cross-newsroom collaborations strengthen communities
Shannon McGregor More bogus embedded tweets in our stories
Francesco Marconi The year of iterative journalism
Nicholas Jackson More transparency around newsroom decisions
Shalabh Upadhyay A culture clash on India’s growing Internet
Libby Bawcombe Haikus of the news
Patrick Butler Measuring impact will increase audience trust
Simon Galperin After capitalism’s fire, journalism’s secondary succession
Alexis Lloyd & Matt Boggie The year product leads media
Nikki Usher Three ways national media will further undermine trust
Soo Oh Just showing our work isn’t enough
John Garrett You can’t raise prices forever
Matt Waite “I went to Node.js because I wished to live deliberately”
Jenée Desmond-Harris It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white
Darryl Holliday Let’s talk about power (yours)
Rachel Glickhouse Newsrooms will prioritize audience needs
Umbreen Bhatti The story doesn’t end for the people we quote
Nathalie Malinarich Video — yes, video
Michael Grant More newsrooms experiment their way to success
Alexandra Svokos Good luck convincing us millennials to pay
Gabriel Snyder Journalism doesn’t fit well in a funnel
Julia Rubin Meeting people where they are
John Biewen Podcasts keep getting better
Johannes Klingebiel We all grow hooves
Rachel Davis Mersey Local news goes minimalist
Francesco Zaffarano Towards a rethinking of journalism on social media
Robert Hernandez Racists and sexists get replaced
Brian Moritz The subscription-pocalypse is about to hit
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer The most beautiful sentence in 2019 is “No.”
Sue Cross Return of the water cooler
Kjerstin Thorson Time to get mad about information inequality (again)
Sue Robinson Reporters go on the offensive
Jared Newman AI-generated fakes launch a software arms race
Pia Frey You can’t solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis
Glyn Mottershead and Martin Chorley When a tech company pulls the plug on your story
Juleyka Lantigua Podcasting battles East Coast bias
Almar Latour Reported facts, weaponized in service of action
Tim Carmody Unlocking the commons
Julie Posetti The year of the fight back
Jeff Chin We detox from Chartbeat
Borja Bergareche Sainz de los Terreros Entering a more balanced era
Nisha Chittal The homepage makes a comeback
Sarah Stonbely Mapping the local news ecosystem — with scale but detail
Ruth Palmer and Benjamin Toff From news fatigue to news avoidance
Steve Grove A reckoning for tech’s work with news
Bill Grueskin Toward a symphony model for local news
Elizabeth Dunbar Local reporters reflect on what’s not important
Rebecca Lee Sanchez We are all actors in the running rampant of political theater
Celeste LeCompte Local news needs local conversation to survive
Peter Cunliffe-Jones The focus of misinformation debates shifts south
Nico Gendron Reaching Generation Z beyond the coasts
Rebecca Searles From silos to Swiss Army knife teams
Colleen Shalby Representation becomes more than a talking point
Efrat Nechushtai Journalism wants to be your friend, not your teacher
Dan Shanoff Bet on sports gambling
Joel Konopo Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa
Ben Werdmuller The platform tide is turning
Jonathan Gill Publishers build a common tech platform together
Tamar Charney Seriously: What do you do for people?
Angèle Christin Algorithms and the reflexive turn
Ole Reißmann The rise of vertical storytelling
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen A long, slow slog, with no one coming to the rescue
Alexandra Borchardt Newsrooms need to build trust with their journalists, not just the audience
Matt Karolian Publishers come to terms with being Facebook’s enablers
Taylor Lorenz Personal branding is more powerful than ever
Meredith Artley Huge demand for…anything but politics
Becca Aaronson From bridge roles to product thinkers
Seth C. Lewis The gap between journalism and research is too wide
Alberto Cairo A year of uncertainty and confidence
Zuzanna Ziomecka News leadership gets an overdue upgrade
Joshua P. Darr The nationalization of political news will accelerate
Candis Callison Learn from Indigenous journalists on covering climate change
Andrew Ramsammy The great re-pivot to audio
Jennifer Dargan You don’t build diversity through one-off training sessions
An Xiao Mina The death of consensus, not the death of truth
Mike Isaac The old exit doors for digital media companies are closing
Cory Bergman Journalism as a technology service
John Saroff The pivot to reader revenue’s unintended consequences
Raney Aronson-Rath We learn “digital” doesn’t have to mean “short”
Elite Truong What do we owe the next generation?
Jonathan Stray More algorithmic accountability reporting, and a lot of it will be meh
Mandy Velez Putting the social back in social media
Christa Scharfenberg and Vickie Baranetsky The year of the lawsuit
Dheerja Kaur A focus on problems, not platforms
Thomas Hanitzsch The rise of tribal journalism
Mat Yurow Content competition from the tech companies
Jesse Brown Canada’s subsidy for news backfires
Angilee Shah The year news orgs say “yes” to real leaders
Errin Haines Say it with me: Racism
Rodney Gibbs A bright — and young — year for audio
Heba Aly The rise of international nonprofit news
Renan Borelli Developing loyalty means developing your talent
J. Siguru Wahutu Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019
Catalina Albeanu Being responsible for what we don’t know
Jake Shapiro Podcasting is media’s slow food movement
Whitney Phillips Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended
Charo Henríquez Pivot to journalism
Emma Carew Grovum The year of the loyal reader
Jeremy Gilbert AI finally becomes helpful
Tyler Fisher This is journalism’s do-or-die moment
Cristi Hegranes A year to invest in the security of local journalists
Reyhan Harmanci Selling more stories to Hollywood
Laura E. Davis More access, but not that kind
Carrie Brown-Smith Advocating a healthy civic life is no journalistic crime
Mike Caulfield Ditch the media literacy cynicism and get to work
Alyssa Zeisler We expand what (and how and who) we serve
Sarah Alvarez Simplify and redistribute
Jim Friedlich Meet Citizen Kane 2.0
Andrea Faye Hart Doing less harm, not just more good
Winny de Jong Data journalism goes undercover
Andrew Donohue Voting rights becomes the new climate change
Ernie Smith The year we step back from the platform
Linda Solomon Wood The year of the climate reporter
LaToya Drake Listen up: New stories, new storytellers
Gideon Lichfield Goodbye attention economy, we’ll miss you
Ben Smith The pendulum starts to swing back
Kate Myers Journalism continues to be bad for democracy
Kawandeep Virdee Media wants to take care of you
Elizabeth Jensen Going where the Acela can’t take you
Michael Rain The year of the culturally relevant curator
Pablo Boczkowski Reimagining the media for post-institutional times
Mandy Jenkins Fight the urge to run away from social media
Rubina Madan Fillion Fighting the reality of deepfakes
Marie Shanahan Newsrooms take the comments sections back from platforms
Kyra Darnton A shift to depth in video
Kevin D. Grant A year to embrace journalism as public service
Steve Henn Smart speakers get smarter
Kainaz Amaria We consider who’s behind the camera
Eric Nuzum The year of the DIY podcast network
Kristen Muller Local news fails — in a good way
Steve Myers From trying to cover it all to covering what matters
Mike Rispoli and Craig Aaron Government funds local news — and that’s a good thing
Sarah Marshall A return to destination journalism
Ariel Zirulnick Participation gets professional
Heather Bryant We are responsible for how we use our power
Joanne McNeil Building a digital hospice
Kelsey Proud Journalism becomes the escape
Renée Kaplan Our future could lie within our own organizations
Carolina Guerrero Spanish-language audio blows up
Logan Molyneux Seeing social media for what it is
Callie Schweitzer The rise of the conveners
Monique Judge Committing to the truth, calling out lies
Adam Smith Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news
Joe Amditis Give the audience a seat at the table
Dave Burdick Seeing our blind spots
Greg Emerson Power to the user
Josh Schwartz A pullback from platforms and a focus on product
Victor Pickard We will finally confront systemic market failure
Cindy Royal For journalism curriculum to change, its faculty needs disruption
Amy Schmitz Weiss Local news isn’t where you thought it was
Annie Rudd A more intimate aesthetic of politics — on Insta
Adam B. Ellick Video forensic reporting goes mainstream — and local
Stephanie Edgerly It’s time to understand the un-audience
Seema Yasmin We will create our own spaces