Crowdsourcing and Doxing: What is it?

Sarah-Ellen Calise
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

With connections throughout the world growing day by day through social media, crowdsourcing is an important part of journalism. It makes our lives as journalists easier. It can also help our audience feel as though they are helping tell the story. However, even though crowdsourcing can help tell a story, we have an important role as journalists. We have to remember to verify all of the information that we receive. If we didn’t do this, we would basically be like your grandma who shares those stories on social media about how aliens are real that includes a video of an alien dancing with a tv host.

Via: Giphy

Doxing is another thing that journalists can use in their practice. Doxing is when personal and identifiable information is released about a person. Doxing is more controversial especially nowadays when social media is involved. When used correctly doxing can be useful when finding someone by allowing social media to see their personal information so that they can be more easily identified. However, doxing can also go wrong. When giving out personal or identifiable information about a person, a journalist needs to make sure that there is a good reason and that they have the correct information. If a journalist puts out information about someone and it’s not true but the audience doesn’t know that, it can turn into a big problem. In today’s world, I think journalists need to be extremely vigilant about the information they are receiving and putting out there.

Breaking news can be hard to deal with. As journalists, it’s our job to get the facts straight and report them in a timely manner. When something first breaks on social media it’s important to get the facts straight right away. It can get complicated when the story may be an emotional situation, like the Boston Bombing. What I would do is to gather all the information that I could at the time that is on social media. I would break the story but I would want to say that there was not a lot of information yet, as I’m gathering information so that I could verify what I could. Even though there might have been a bunch of information coming through, not all of it was correct so I would want to make sure that what I was reporting was correct. This could be hard but not putting out as much information that's out there, I think, would be better than speculating and misreporting.

Sarah-Ellen Calise

Written by

Junior at Northern-Vermont University-Lyndon. Weather geek 🌩 and animal lover.

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