I Am You And You Are Me?

Karissa Franklin
2 min readSep 27, 2020

Audiences see no difference between themselves and journalists. We know this because almost everyone has smartphones and the ability to share news, whether local or global. Unfortunately with everyone sharing news, the information could be one-sided or false. Roper in the Rules and Pitfalls of Twitter said, “On social media, you’re predisposed to trust the people you follow. But that trust has to be tested every single day.”

Graph of Twitter news sources

With 86% of users getting their news from Twitter, there’s bound to be some discrepancies in factual news. Audiences don’t have the training or patience to fact check themselves or others. The goal is to show solidarity in the news given and retweet it for peers to learn. Pew Research Center did a study on Twitter users news activity. They found [users in the sample were more likely to send an original post than a retweet when tweeting in general, but when posting about news, the opposite was true.] People would rather share than create their own ideas regarding the news.

Conservatives and Liberals know that President Trump has tweeted some questionable things. Twitter spokesperson, Katie Rosborough said, “these tweets contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.” Without fact-checking, the public and election could’ve been harmed. Audiences shouldn’t view themselves as street journalists, but journalists’ assistants. Help us get the story right before clicking share.

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Karissa Franklin

Senior at UH. My major is Journalism Print. I’m also a lifestyle blogger and activist. Subscribe to my blog at whatiscasual.com