Social Media and Conventional Media: Sometimes There’s No Difference

I always like to ask professionals, no matter their industry: “What’s a good screening question to see whether someone in your profession may be competent?”

In the case of someone who does investigations, I regularly advise that if someone tells you, “It’s all online,” then find another investigator. Same with “How will you introduce yourself when you interview someone?” If the answer is that they will pretend they are the New York Times or law enforcement, again it’s time to find someone else.

A new question would be: Do you know how to use social media? My preferred answer is coming around to this: social media and conventional media are now so intertwined (and sometimes indistinguishable) that not having knowledge of social media is a major liability for many kinds of investigations (and certainly the kind I do).

Consider the Minnesota daycare scandal that this month pushed the state’s governor, Tim Walz, out of his reelection race. This story has been bubbling along for a while but was broken wide open by a print-only publication, County Highway. You would not have known about it unless you were a subscriber or read about someone discussing the article on social media. That is conventional media amplified by social media.

As the story progressed, a young man named Nick Shirley took his phone around to various day care facilities in Minnesota and posted a 45 minute report on YouTube. Walz dropped out shortly afterward.

Is YouTube social media or not? You can watch traditional television on it, but also the Nick Shirley type of production. Whatever you call it, a failure to check YouTube is a recipe for an incomplete investigation. It doesn’t matter what you think of Shirley’s work, or the position County Highway or anyone else takes on the issue. As an investigator, you gather evidence and if you’re like me, you let your clients decide what to make of it.

[I’ve been skeptical here sometimes about the impact of artificial intelligence on complex investigations, but one place I’ve long argued it will help is in making all YouTube and publicly available podcasts keyword searchable someday. Imagine if every podcast in every language were automatically transcribed and translated. That day is coming and will create an avalanche of new data for smart people to sort through].

INVESTIGATOR AS WEIGHER

Not only are conventional and social media intertwined, but there is also often nothing much to distinguish between them.

You may say, “conventional media is edited, whereas anyone can put anything they want on social media, completely unfiltered.” The second part of this sentence is true, but conventional media outside the quality newspaper industry will print/post just about anything you throw at it.

For instance, when I wrote my book in 2016 I put out a news release over one of the commercial services. Anyone can pay Business Wire or one of the other services to send their announcement out to hundreds or thousands or outlets. I did this, and presto: The news release I wrote in the style of a journalistic story (referring to myself as “Segal,” quoting myself) was reproduced verbatim all over the country on news sites and the news feeds of television stations.

Some may have noted that they were quoting a news release, but many just stuck a byline on top of my release and turned it into a story.

One thing I argued in my book is that a good investigator needs to weigh the evidence being gathered. It’s highly problematic to be caught lying about your bio in a securities filing, but people stretch and fabricate things all the time on LinkedIn, where nobody checks what you put up there about yourself. A bio is evidence, but sometimes the evidence is strong (date of birth in  a passport) and sometimes weak (free websites).

News releases that are reproduced as “news” may be accurate but need to be checked with a more skeptical eye than a news story a real reporter worked on and wrote from scratch after checking facts and interviewing for opposing points of view.

So just as a good investigator needs to be able to distinguish between and weigh press releases and well researched stories, social media demands the same kind of weighing – it could be 1) garbage; 2) unchecked but revealing material about the poster; 3) original material that will make news; 4) a news report that itself needs to be evaluated; or 5) something else.

Weighing doesn’t mean rendering a verdict, the way juries weigh evidence. But it does help to tell an investigator either that a person worked in location X or for employer Y, or that there is a sketchy piece of information indicating the X and Y facts that needs through verification.

Investigations can take a long time, and understanding where your evidence comes from and how reliable it might be is something a good investigator must always keep in mind. Just because it’s called “social media” is no reason to ignore it.