Twitter and Politics
While reading Cardell’s discussion of how the political sphere has shifted since the emergence of social platforms, I couldn’t help but think of Twitter. Cardell’s observation that the 24-hour broadcasting of the news has nearly “eliminated the role of editors in the news production process” made me think of how Twitter has taken this even another step further by circumventing the media altogether.
Before the age of 24-hour broadcasting, news stations had hours to gather, analyze, and verify the content they’d be reporting, but now there are news sources reporting on events even just seconds after they take place. This is typically not a huge issue, however, because these news sources have knowledgeable staff who can interpret the events in a way that the general public can understand.
Twitter is essentially this rapid reporting, but without the interpretation. That is left to the user, who will often be influenced by the opinions of those they follow. So, when a political figure tweets something that’s false, if a follower of theirs doesn’t also follow opposing sources, it is likely that they will believe that politician without any further research into what was said.
An example of this is former President Trump who tweeted multiple times this past presidential election about mail-in ballots being fraudulent and that the election was stolen from him despite the numerous credible sources reporting the opposite. The problem with this is that not only was the information false, but the information went directly to the people instead of through the buffer of the media.
When news sources reported on what Trump had tweeted, they were able to include the caveat “yet this has been proven false by XX source.” Twitter did not, at the time, have such capabilities and what resulted was a large group of people truly believing that the election was stolen, the result of which we all saw on January 6th.
Twitter has since implemented strategies to try to limit the spread of misinformation on the platform, such as: marking information as false, prompting users to read articles before they retweet them, even suspending the accounts of important figures.
But while these changes are good, this situation poses the question: how is the media supposed to continue to be the gatekeeper of information flows when social media platforms like Twitter have the potential to make the media obsolete?
