So someone passed along this article about the person behind the AnonyOps twitter account and his alleged self-imposed exile from the United States. It’s a fascinating read that highlights the blurring of realistic fear of government actions and paranoia. I don’t have any reason to doubt his claims of exile, but at the same time he could be living in Los Angeles. What’s also interesting is the discussion was posted on Asher Wolf’s website, a Twitter user who has regularly blurred lines, this time between journalism and tweeting.
I’ve only been on Twitter for a short period of time, but I have a decidedly mixed opinion of Ms. Wolf. She seems nice enough, but too often I feel she overstates her journalism. Retweeting and collecting stuff from Twitter isn’t exactly journalism. A facet maybe, but journalism is also a lot more. More importantly, Twitter “journalists” have shown a tendency to be flat out wrong. Take for instance this retweet of hers from about an hour before I wrote this:
As you can see the tweet is from a year and a half ago and comes from a UK news anchor. The tweet links to this Snopes.com article that includes an infamous picture of Connecticut state representatives playing solitaire during a budget debate. So she’s retweeted a year and a half old tweet about a three and a half year old photograph. Amazingly, even though the Snopes article clearly indicates this was during a debate in the Connecticut State House, the original retweet says it shows “Congressman” during “the key debate to save the US debt crisis,” which is completely false. Connecticut had budget issues like the rest of the United States during the recession, but retweeting something of this nature during the sequestration era is clearly aligning an old state issue with a national issue with which it had no relationship. People have pointed this out to Wolf (and very belatedly Mr. Snow) but if she’s a journalist shouldn’t she have read at least read the full article and realized what the photograph shows? Probably.
I don’t really know where I planned to go with this whole thing, other than to say the one thing Twitter truly has done is blur lots of lines. Some of them are good, traditional media (read: newspapers, television news, etc.) could use improvement from some citizen journalists. At the same time it’s not a universally good thing. Too often we’re willing to blur retweeting anything, regardless of validity, as a form of journalism.
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