Journalists Are Not Social Media Platforms’ Unpaid Content Moderators

For years tech companies have been getting free content moderation from journalists who have often been the ones unearthing illegal or problematic behaviour on huge platforms, with social networks only dealing with issues once they know that there’s an impending news article coming. At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey noted the role that journalists play in counteracting disinformation that spreads and is incentivized on his platform.

We have this amazing constituency of journalists globally using our service every single day, and they often with a high degree of velocity call out unfactual information. We don’t do the best job of giving them tools and context to do that work, and we think there’s a lot of improvements we can make to amplify their content and their messaging so people can see what is happening with that context.

But journalists are not content moderators. It is not reporters’ jobs to work in service of cleaning up the platforms of some of the most powerful companies on the planet. Journalists are not employed by Twitter or Facebook or Google, but in reporting content to them that violates these platforms’ rules, or actively pushing back against disinformation, they are fundamentally doing valuable work for them: “We do benefit,” from journalists fighting disinformation, Dorsey said.