Since I criticized the Washington Post’s social media policy last year (before I even imagined returning to the Washington market), I guess I should comment on Mike Wise’s stupid Twitter stunt and the Post’s response.
In a nutshell: Wise knowingly published a false statement about a football player on Twitter, a hoax intended to show how people would pass along unverified information that they read on Twitter. The Post has suspended him for 30 days.
My headline when I wrote about the Post’s policy last year was “Washington Post needs social media conversation, not guidelines.” I am quite sure that regular, honest conversation about smart social media use would have been more likely (though never certain) to prevent foolish use of social media by staff members. Clearly, the guidelines did not (and, without question, Wise violated the guidelines).
I don’t have time or interest in going into this in depth, and plenty of blogs have already weighed in (I am jumping into this fray late). But I will make two points:
- Even though people did repeat what Wise tweeted, he proved nothing about Twitter. If he had written the same thing in the Washington Post or on washingtonpost.com, it would have been quoted, because he was a respected, trusted voice on sports and because the Post is a trusted brand. Why shouldn’t the same people quote the same person or the same brand on Twitter?
- Would a 30-day suspension (a harsh punishment, to be sure) be enough if a Post staff member perpetrated a hoax in the Washington Post or on washingtonpost.com?
I’ve pondered the matter a bit, partly because I just didn’t quite get the supposed point of this exercise on Wise’s part. Testing how misinformation spreads online? What was this supposed to prove?
More to the point, and why it confused me, is the question of exactly what new there is to discover. It’s been a full fifty years since Alan Abel pulled off the SINA hoax and got on tv decrying the indecency of naked livestock. What does Wise think is new to discover about stating falsehoods?
The conclusion I came to is that it it just another example of “the media is the message” thinking. Somehow he thinks that saying something as yourself on twitter must be different than saying something as yourself on television or in print.
I guess it’s not surprising that people who think there’s nothing to gain for your reputation in alternate forms of communication also think there’s no way to ruin your reputation in those mediums.
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[…] — a traditional news organization — rather than Twitter itself. As TBD’s Steve Buttry pointed out, people would have run with this story if Wise had planted it in the Post itself or on its website; […]
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I like your post. I’ve never understood why some organizations need a social media policy or why that policy is too often prepared by those who neither use social media nor offer original unapproved opinions of their own.
Still I keep thinking about that WMD hoax and the role of the Washington Post etal in perpetuating it. If a 30-day suspension is warranted for initiating a twitter hoax, what should the penalty be for using a hoax to help start a war?
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[…] that will help us use the tools effectively. The example cited — the Washington Post’s Mike Wise planting a bogus story — was simply bad journalism, as publishing false information would be in any format. The […]
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[…] does something irresponsible (for instance, tweeting facts you haven’t verified or, as Mike Wise did, tweeting something he knew to be wrong), you should expect a discussion with the boss or even some discipline. But we don’t need […]
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