Legitimating a platform: evidence of journalists’ role in transferring authority to Twitter

Figures & data

Table 1. Depending on the story, the source, and the tweet itself, journalists may treat tweets in news stories more like content or more like sources.

More like content	More like a source
Tweet left alone to speak for itself	Context, corroboration, contradiction, adjectives, description, qualifiers, explanation
Tweet is the only way we hear from the person	Multiple ways of hearing from the person
Refer to the tweet or embed it directly	Refer to the tweeter, especially if speaking/acting in settings other than Twitter
Twitter is assumed authority, verified	Twitter needs explanation or qualification
Twitter is the frame, story about the tweet	Story external to Twitter, tweets used in support

Figure 1. The most common way to refer to a tweet is to say that its author ‘tweeted’ or ‘said in a tweet,’ often accompanied by an indicator of when the tweet was sent. The link in the Sun-Sentinel story goes not to the tweet but to another Sun-Sentinel story about the tweet.

Figure 2. A CNN story says a source ‘tweeted,’ quotes the tweet in full, links to it, and then embeds it.

Figure 3. This Washington Post story describes the contents of a video without ever saying where the video came from, then embeds a tweet from a Times of Israel reporter that contains the video but still doesn’t say where it originated.