Social Media Reporting will Be the Death of Us All

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

Honestly and truly, I have beef with social media reporters (and I don’t even do meat, so you know it’s serious). As an internet researcher and data privacy advocate, I regularly search the interwebs to see where I pop up online. While I do this with my given name, I also do this with my government name, various internet handles, and pseudonyms as well, which is a fun way of reflecting on past internet personas and my burgeoning online identities.

That was until I started to notice that my social media handles would occasionally appear in articles and publications for the popular press.

Almost like a quote from a source that you would find in a traditional article, these tweets and social media posts would usually appear along with other people’s posts mixed in with a journalist’s commentary or coverage on a hashtag, event, or cultural concern. While I would usually not have an issue with this, I found it odd that no one had ever asked me if I wanted to be included as a “source”. Instead, the journalist would take it upon themselves to include me in their article, signal boosting my online comments without any follow-up or consideration of my public facing privacy.

And while we can say that most tweets and social media posts are public, I have also addressed how that cultural belief can have many…