Citizen journalism means more information is available from more sources, but sorting out fact from fiction becomes immensely more difficult.
The nation was gripped with fear and fascination on Friday as it watched a manhunt for two suspected terrorists play out around Boston. Some watched television, relying on seasoned journalists to witness the story unfold, but for many, the best and fastest source of information was through social media.
Ordinary citizens, the homeowners and residents of Watertown, Mass., and its nearby neighborhoods, were put in prime position to document the terror unfolding around them. They provided updates, relaying exactly what they saw through their front windows and heard from the streets just beyond their front doors. They delivered information they got when police officers did sweeps of their homes and provided the context that a reporter who wasn’t from the area would never have. They cut out the middleman of the traditional journalist.
This access caused a lot of trouble.
Citizen journalism can be powerful, and it can be dangerous. When the people report the news, they are able to tell the stories the traditional journalist may have glossed over for the sake of space or national interest. In the case of a dramatic and quickly unfolding situation, they can share details a reporter could never get, as was the case in Watertown. But there are certain standards and principles citizen journalists often accidentally gloss over that can create serious problems for the greater public.
One major problem is citizen journalists knowing what to report and when. Professional journalists hold the tenet of independence close to their hearts. They pride themselves on making their own judgment calls about what’s important and what the public needs to know and exposing liars and hidden information within the system without heeding the concerns of the story’s subjects, who may not want that information widely known for fear of their own embarrassment or self-interest. A newspaper should never hold a story about government deceit because it doesn’t want to harm the reputation of the politicians doing wrong, nor should it cover up the failings of a business when reporting on the business could hurt its sales.
However, there are times when it can be necessary to hold onto information of great magnitude when public officials request it. In times of great crisis, when police are attempting to perform covert operations, it is essential that their tactics and strategies remain secret. In Watertown, police were doing wide sweeps and staking out certain areas of high concern. Some journalists worked with police to make sure they were reporting only what could be known without giving away secret information and bringing the lives of the officers and responders into danger. At that time, reducing harm was much more important than acting independently.
Citizen journalists, who were not in communication with police, did not have the same knowledge about what was and wasn’t OK to report. People tweeted pictures and videos of police around their homes, including full addresses and locations. Having access to police scanner signals through websites such as Broadcastify worsened the problem because many people were tweeting out information from those lines of communication between police officers, revealing more strategic plans.
We now know that one of the suspects likely had a Twitter account and could easily see any information people were posting, thus using it to his advantage. Tweeting this information opened the police officers to further weakness. It became such a problem that Broadcastify shut down its service in the middle of the day and the Boston Police Department sent out frantic messages, beginning “WARNING” and “WANTED”in all-caps, urging people to stop posting scanner information.
Fact-checking was also a huge issue. Many took the information they heard on the scanners as fact, when really they were catching snippets of police officers’ first reactions to incidents as they tried to communicate with each other. For reporters, the scanner has long been a starting point of research — it provides a seed of information, but much more investigation needs to be done before any information can be passed on as fact.
For the amateur journalists listening in, everything was fact. It even led to two people being falsely identified as killers, according to The Huffington Post, a mistake even some major news outlets made.
This doesn’t mean that citizen journalism is valueless. When people wanted to know what was happening in real-time, Twitter was the place for up-to-date accounts of what people saw and heard. Video footage filmed through a doorway that showed one of the early firefights between police officers and the suspects was widely distributed and provided a chilling account of the scene in Watertown.
Often, people provided information through the service that acted as tips for the mainstream media, who were then able to verify and deny information. However, what happened last week should make us reevaluate our social media behavior in times of crisis, and this includes many traditional journalists who were also using social media to perpetuate false and dangerous information. We need to be aware of the consequences of our actions and think critically about what any piece of information can mean in the larger scope of the event.
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