Before anyone knew who would take the presidency in 2o12, it was clear that Twitter had emerged as an important tool for politicians and the journalists who covered them.<\/p>\n
During the 2012 presidential election,\u00a0political campaigns jumped into social media and began using the platform to get their messages directly to the voters.<\/p>\n
Journalists used Twitter to cover the candidates in real time as news feeds transformed into an infinitely scrolling mass during the most heightened events. Twitter capitalized on these conversations by creating the Twitter Political Index<\/a>, billing it as another tool, similar to polling, to analyze public sentiment about the candidates.<\/p>\n That was also when Mark Coddington<\/a>, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, began analyzing tweets from political journalists. Wanting to\u00a0examine how social media might change campaign reporting, he found journalists were still repeating what candidates said without checking the facts.<\/p>\n During the presidential debates, Coddington and his colleagues observed Twitter users doing real-time fact-checking of candidates’ claims. The scholars, including Logan Molyneux and Regina Lawrence, were curious about whether Twitter was changing the way journalists reported the debates, particularly because of the fact-checking. Their work was published in the International Journal of Press\/Politics.<\/p>\n Examining tweets from 430 political reporters and commentators, they found that 60 percent simply repeated a candidate\u2019s claims. Although some journalists and pundits used the platform to comment, these were mostly assertions, with no facts cited to back them up.<\/p>\n Most journalists simply repeated what candidates said rather than fact-check their claims.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you look at previous research on political journalism, they have pretty well established norms and routines, and they don\u2019t really like to upset those things,” Coddington said.<\/p>\n Although Twitter didn’t inspire a stream of real-time fact-checking in 2012, two political journalists \u2014 Matt Vasilogambros and Olivia Nuzzi \u2014 identified other ways that social media, particularly Twitter, affects the way they do their jobs.<\/p>\n Matt Vasilogambros<\/a> has covered Washington politics for the National Journal for three years.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I was in college, we were just understanding how Twitter can be used for journalism,\u201d he explained in an email. \u201cA few years later, and after several mistakes, we’re only truly comprehending the beast that is Twitter.\u201d<\/p>\nReal-time fact-checking on Twitter<\/strong><\/h3>\n
“The beast that is Twitter”<\/h3>\n