Social Media, Surveillance, and News Work

Abstract

Social media platforms are becoming an indispensable resource for journalists. Their use involves both direct interaction with the platforms themselves and, increasingly, the use of specialist third-party apps to find, filter, and follow content and contributors. This article explores some of the ways that social media platforms, and their technological ecosystems, are infusing news work. A range of platforms and apps—including Geofeedia, Spike, and Twitter—were critically examined, and their use by trainee journalists (N = 81) analysed. The results reveal how journalists can—and do—surveil social network users and their content via sophisticated, professional apps that are also utilised by the police and security forces. While journalists recognise the value of such apps in news work, they also have concerns, including about privacy and popularism. Although the participants in this study thought the apps they used could help with verification, there were warning signs that an over-reliance on the technology could develop, dulling journalists’ critical faculties.

Keywords:

• algorithms
• artificial intelligence
• computational journalism
• geolocation
• social media monitoring
• surveillance
• third-party apps
• verification

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Geofeedia for making their app available for this study and Steve Schifferes for his useful contributions to an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1. Although starting life as an independent third-party app, TweetDeck was acquired by Twitter in 2011 (Halliday 2011).

2. For example, at the time data for this study were collected Twitter provided no means for journalists to search for tweets from a precise location within its own apps.

3. “Native” social network posts from Instagram and Facebook have also been included since June 2015, and, as of March 2017, posts from Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube were also available on the platform.

4. See https://www.socialsensor.eu.

5. By March 2017, Twitter’s advanced search page was offering more precise geographical filtering down to the level of “neighbourhood or city” (Twitter 2017).