At the Knight-Batten Symposium at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Wednesday, keynote speaker and Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth made a provocative statement. I’m paraphrasing here, but it was something like, “Thank goodness social media wasn’t invented yet on September 11.”
Eds Note: Jeff Sonderman has the full quote at Poynter, along with additional analysis of the eyebrow-raising speech.
She noted how horrific it would be to read the final tweets or Facebook updates of those destined to die in the Twin Towers or watch YouTube videos from inside the burning buildings as people are jumping out. And she’s right, it would be horrific….but I don’t say “thank goodness” to that lack of social media. I imagine, “What if?”
I say, if today’s social media had been around, those who perished on September 11, 2001 could have been the storytellers of their own history.. When I put this wondering onto my Facebook page and Google+, it prompted a great discussion with other journalists and social media users.
Cory Bergman of BreakingNews.com disagreed with Weymouth’s premise, “That’s like saying, thank goodness there was no live TV — we didn’t need to see the towers collapse.”
Angel Brownawell agreed with Bergman, saying, “We would’ve all had A LOT of information to consume and sift through, but it wouldn’t have been any more distressing than hearing about the last voice mails, answering machine messages or the live TV images.”
Which journalists wouldn’t look, albeit squeamishly, for the last words and moments of fellow Americans, intentionally left behind for history and final goodbyes? We would have been able to sift through the mounds of social media data to piece together the story in a way we still haven’t been able to manage. We’d know who was there, how they died and exactly what happened to them. We’d have known went through the minds of those who chose to jump from the Towers. We’d have known exactly how a plane went down in a field in Shanksville, Pa.
On my Facebook page, Jeremy Binckes of TBD extolled the value of those first-hand reports,”The one thing about the attacks we’ll never know and will never be CERTAIN of is,”What was it really like? … It’s the one angle of the story we’ll never really know firsthand.”
My former soccer coach, Jim Boyd, noted on Facebook, “Perhaps having social media would have changed the events on the planes in a positive way.”
Law enforcement would have benefitted from social media, too. It would have helped to know who was in the Twin Towers or the Pentagon and who was just missing after the confusion. Recounting and videos of emergency rescues from these scenes could have helped inform safety procedures for future events.
Even aside from its use for journalists, law enforcement and historians, I think social media would have been a vital way for the nation to come together with friends, family, and strangers for comfort. Remember what it was like the night Osama Bin Laden was killed? Nobody could have felt alone with such a networked world out there.
Bruce Warren noted there was a bit of social media in use at the time that brought he and his friends together.
That morning I was on a public message board with people I had met through a band. Many lived in NYC and were posting updates all morning. Also helped to make sure everyone was accounted for that we could think of on there. Was not uncommon that day to read an update, then hear it via the media.
Brownawell and my friend Lauren Worley noted the importance of AOL Instant Messenger on 9/11.
“I was living in Washington, D.C. at the time, and it was the only way I could communicate with my family to let them know my coworkers and I were ok where we were, ” Worley commented on Facebook.
Brownawell had a similar story.
“I remember hoping into an AIM chatroom that day and night, and talking to about 30 or so people for dozens of hours about what had happened. Not Facebook, not Twitter. But still online social interactions. Perhaps if Twitter had been around, I would still be in touch with those people today.”
Facebook comments can’t guarantee a lack of anonymity
By Mandy
On August 19, 2011
In Community Engagement, Facebook, Industry News & Notes
There’s a conventional wisdom out there in the online journalism world that: 1.) News site comments will automatically be better if people have to use real names, and 2.) Using Facebook for your comments will accomplish this.
I’ve said many times before that I don’t think anonymity is the problem. My campaign on that seems to be a lost cause so far. As a former comment moderator and current manager of social media accounts, I know for a fact that people have absolutely no problem spouting hateful views and violent rhetoric under their real name. I see it every day.
Aside from that, there’s also all kinds of evidence that Facebook comments aren’t the end-all, be-all answer on this front.
As my friend Jeff Sonderman recently wrote at Poynter, Facebook comments can be a boon to news sites in lots of ways: Increased Facebook traffic referrals, fast page load times, an easy out-of-the-box comment solution.
One thing Facebook doesn’t do, however, is prevent anonymity (as the same article and several others insist).
While there is a rule on Facebook that one has to use their real name, it’s not always followed. I have several Facebook friends who use false names for various personal reasons – and they are all, essentially, anonymous. That said, they are still identifiable to their friends, which still keeps some people in check with their online comments. (Though this certainly doesn’t apply to everyone.)
The biggest threat to the alleged transparency and decency of Facebook-powered commenting lies in the same tool many news organizations use to communicate with readers: Facebook Pages.
Just speaking anecdotally here (if you have stats to back me up, please help), I’ve seen an uptick of abusive posts and trolling on Facebook ever since it rolled out its new pages in February. That rollout included the new ability to use Facebook as a page.
This change made it possible for just anyone to set up a fake character on Facebook – and then use Facebook as that character. On The Huffington Posts’s pages (on which I am an administrator) and the pages of other groups and news organizations, I’ve seen these fake accounts spreading spam, trolling the page’s regular users and making hateful statements under the guise of a made-up character.
Here’s a view examples of some alias accounts I found on news pages (or skip below if you want):
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Even before this change, there was a history of false profiles spamming and trolling Facebook, the addition of Use-As-Page to the toolbox only gave trolls a new way to stay in business. Facebook has staff that deals with those accounts when they are found or reported, but it certainly can’t be easy for them to keep up with people who are dead set on being trolly.
(Related aside: When I worked as a comment moderator for the Cincinnati Enquirer, a troublesome site user with many usernames emailed me to say, “I’m retired and have nothing else to do but create new accounts every time you block me. I can make your live miserable.” This is just a sampling of the mentality of trolls, folks. Here’s another.)
Now, I’ve got no doubt that some news sites have seen higher quality discussion after installing Facebook commenting; it’s definitely better than many of in-house or other out-of-the-box solutions I’ve seen on news websites. It likely is the best option for those sites that don’t have the technical expertise and manpower to host and manage a heavy flow of onsite comments day in and day out – so long as they don’t mind handing a big part of their community to Facebook.
I’m just warning that news sites shouldn’t assume that Facebook on its own will solve their commenting problems. Users can and will still be anonymous (or even identifiable) hateful trolls. To make it work, you still need a daily moderation workflow and a newsroom-wide commitment to not only reading story/blog comments, but responding to them.