The HT has had a social media presence for more than a decade. We were “early adopters” in the social media realm, and I’m mostly to blame. But in all the years we’ve been posting local news to social media, we’ve never deleted a post. Until now.
When the governor announced the statewide mask mandate, we posted the information as breaking news, because it was. Within 72 hours that post generated thousands of “engagements” and almost 100 comments. I don’t cringe at profanity and I’m not averse to differing viewpoints, but what I encountered in the comments bypassed a few “bad” words. It jumped the shark into toxic misinformation that has been refuted by multiple sources. After spending several hours on a Saturday compiling links to debunk the memes and comments, I realized I was fighting a losing battle. People who argue on social media have no interest in obtaining valid information. They want to believe they’re right and have people agree with them. That’s what social media is all about.
Fellow editors and publishers said they arbitrarily delete or hide offensive comments. My personal “that’s not fair” button has a hard time with that, so I deleted the whole post and all the comments: good, bad or indifferent. Our ability to share relevant, important information with our readers about a statewide public health mandate was hindered by a few bad actors sharing falsehoods, and that should scare us all.
Meanwhile, we’re examining our social media policy. (Who are we kidding? We’ve never had a social media policy, because up until recently, we didn’t need one.) We will no longer be posting all our content to social media (because they aren’t paying us for it, we’re giving it to them and getting a headache out of it). We’ll post pertinent breaking news (fires, etc.) and specific stories of widespread interest. If a post triggers the kind of hateful, angry, homophobic, misinformed commentary we’ve seen in the last few weeks, we will take it down.
Is that a violation of your free speech rights? Nope. You have the freedom to post whatever you want on your own page. Kind of like you don’t have the right to put a campaign sign in your neighbor’s yard.
We are also in the process of developing an app so our subscribers can easily access local news without having to plunge into the cesspool of social media or being relegated to old-school internet search engines.
“But I like getting my news for free on social media!”
Well, yeah. I like free food, free health care, free electricity and free entertainment, too. See the irony there? Nothing is free, and if it pretends to be, ask yourself what it’s extracting from you.
And no matter where you are, internet realm or otherwise, be kind, even when you want to scream. If we don’t stick together, we’re doomed.
By NIKI TURNER | [email protected]
