Is there a canonical essay about (the problems with and complexities of) social media aggregation as journalism that I can just link to so I don't have to break down the angles and weirdnesses myself?
@evan Oh no, I mean when journalists collect up a bunch of e.g. tweets and post them with a couple of paragraphs and call it a story. (Really I mean when editors assign this kind of story.)
"Aggregate" is just how I've heard it talked about within journalism.
@jwz Eh, I mean everyone hates the worst examples but there’s a whole spectrum. Covering non-celebrity social media fights is standard practice now, if the fights are zingy or stupid enough. And for years now we’ve had the professionals driving news cycles from Twitter. Deeply weird on a structural level.
So like…call it whatever, but it merits some careful attention as a phenomenon, I think.
@aifaim So on the most practical level, if she obscured his name, there would be zero verifiable evidence for her identification. Providing a name means other people can check the work, and potentially build on it.
On the social level, attaching behavior to names is one of the principal ways investigations (journalistic and legal) work because legal identifiers let us trace connections.
@aifaim …but without attaching behaviors to names, a story like that Krebs post would be nothing but an unverifiable conspiracy theory.
(If BI had also published his photo, phone number, and home address, that would strike me as an unjustified disclosure of private info and flip this from investigative journalism into doxxing.)
It's legitimately interesting to see how often volunteer moderation/server leadership is seen as a vulnerability or a problem in spaces where unpaid open-source dev work is positioned as normal or ideal.
[usual internet disclaimer: I'm on the record all over the place talking about the trade-offs and complexities of volunteer-only efforts, this is not the fight to pick with me]
@luis_in_brief There's a whole mish-mash of reasoning in there, and I'm sure recognition of trauma is part of it. Some really low-level ideas about scale and professionalization, too.