A Classroom Activity Showing Twitter’s Blue Checks Were Flimsy Before Musk
by Marie Heath and Dan Krutka
Our post is coming a little later than usual today because we’ve been dedicating excess time on Twitter to verifying information… Chiquita creating a Banana Republic in Brazil? Eli Lilly giving away insulin for free?
The unchecked Blue Checks on Twitter have led to clever parody, skewering Musk’s plan to allow anyone to purchase a verification badge. Purchased verification removed a large portion of the flimsy guardrails meant to protect users from misinformation. The possibilities for greater disruptions seem obvious, and even the parodies led to material disruptions. Eli Lilly’s stock dropped 4.37% immediately following the fake announcement (What this says about our for-profit health care system is another matter.). On Friday, Senator Markey and the Washington Post pointed out the ease with which a Senator can be impersonated online.
But the reality is, Twitter has always served up mis- and dis-information. The ease with which users can like and retweet, coupled with algorithms designed to increase engagement (and enragement), results in rapid spread of misconceptions, half-truths, and outright lies. Almost 700,000 Twitter users followed or liked Russian troll farm disinformation during the 2016 election. Racist users amplify violent and untrue tweets, harassing Black women on Twitter. The radicalized far right, conspiracy theorists, hate groups, and foreign authoritarian states all manipulate social media and social fissures to harm individuals and society.
Along with Cathryn van Kessel, we designed a media education lesson on the Civics of Technology site to help teachers and students critically analyze online content and environments. We categorized and explained five types of media education approaches, arguing that each approach offers a piece of the puzzle needed for holistic understandings of media experiences. Identifying the cognitive, emotional, social, and critical elements of media helps citizens more accurately navigate information.
We already wrote a blog post in April (“Mapping the Media Education Terrain”) introducing these approaches on our site, but we’re happy to share that they are now published in a short article in Social Education, a practitioner journal of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS). Our article is open access (for now) and it is titled, ““I Know More than the Scietists”: Selecting Media Education Approaches for the Moment. ” We hope it might be helpful for you or your classroom!
For this article, we chose a tweet from the News Literacy Project (NLP)’s “fact check” page to feature. The 2021 tweet by a verified doctor includes a picture of a protester holding a sign “I Know More than the Scietsts” (see the tweet here). The five approaches help to show that tweet can easily misinform via multiple avenues. We identify five questions to go along with each approach:
Think about Sources: Is the information credible?
Respond to Posts: Do I have enough information to interact with the post?
Reflect on Feelings: How do my feelings affect my interpretation and actions?
Observe the Media: How does the type of media and design change my thinking?
Identify Power: Who benefits from, and is harmed by, media representations?
The fact that the tweet was posted by a medical doctor who was verified only adds to the confusion… and that’s when verification had some meaning as an indicator of status.
In fact, the longer we analyzed this single tweet, the more we realized how deep the problems of Twitter (and other social media platforms) go when we depend on them as sources of information and communication. For example, for the “observe the media” approach we suggested that “students could write or tell stories about the protester tweet as a way of exposing how much important context is missing.” For this tweet, students would have to make up most of the story because the tweet barely includes any context and nuance, which is not out of character for the site. Are we sure we wouldn’t be better off if Musk does run Twitter into the ground?
We recognize that Musk’s careless and arrogant “disruption” of Twitter will cause problems for many groups—from journalists to creators to affinity groups to Black Twitter—who have built their work and chats around the platform’s environment. Yet, the fact that Twitter’s demise seems so easy may provide a warning for how flimsy our new media platforms and infrastructures have been all along.
Maybe using the five approaches with students is just as much about exposing the fatal flaws of Twitter as it is about determining credibility.