Social media is a double-edged sword

Social media can do amazing things.

Three years ago we had an impulse to figure out who had been lighting a lone Christmas tree on the Parks Highway that had been a cheery sight for commuters for, at that point, four years running.

“Who’s behind this thing?” we wondered.

Facebook answered quickly and a wonderful Christmas-time story was the result.

Two years ago one of our reporters’ sons ran away from home. Desperate to find the boy, we put a note on the paper’s Facebook page. That large community of folks responded within hours and helped bring the boy home to his worried parents, safely.

Social media did these things.

Certainly, it has changed the way we operate at the Frontiersman. We use it for brief announcements — school is closed today, a major road is blocked, etc. It’s more effective than a similar notice on our website because it’s succinct and it seeks people out where they live these days — on social media.

But while we love Facebook and Twitter as tools — and we do, most definitely, love both of these platforms — it’s not an unconditional, absolute love.

One of the other ways that social media has changed the way we do our jobs is by making rumor control a much larger portion of what we do.

A good case study in how this works came on Tuesday morning as high school students were arriving for classes.

Our Assistant Managing Editor, Andrew Wellner, first heard of the chaotic start to the morning at Palmer High School when he dropped his youngest son at his Butte-area daycare. A worker there said police were at the high school and a student had a gun.

Before he got back on the road, Wellner checked the Mat-Su Valley News Facebook group to see if the community had posted the information there. Indeed, folks had shared the rumors there.

Concerned parents had been writing in for about a half hour at that point. Some were just saying what they knew to be factually correct — “my kid’s bus was diverted to a church parking lot” or “lots of police cars in the neighborhood” — others went further, saying a kid that had caused trouble there before was at it again, or that someone had brought a gun inside the high school.

Wellner quickly abandoned his morning plans and went to the office.

A schools spokeswoman was the first we reached. She knocked down rumors that a student was the cause of the police presence. The first police officer to call back said reports of gunshots in the area were the origin of the hubbub.

No one was arrested. Police weren’t even sure the sounds heard were actually gunfire.

The thing is, Wellner was almost positive from the start that he would be reporting on something nowhere near as dramatic as it had seemed on Mat-Su Valley News.

But he responded to the office anyway because there is value in us providing a traditionally sourced, factual account of what was happening in Palmer. Social media is fun, but there is still a valuable role for journalists to perform sifting fact from fiction.

As you well know, everything you read on social media isn’t true. Whether you are an individual or a social media news-sharing group the practice of posting unconfirmed rumors to social media is irresponsible.

Social media, harnessed properly, is an amazing tool. But used improperly, it leads to things like unnecessary worry over a fictitious school shooting and added calls on busy emergency dispatchers.

So, please, keep that in mind the next time you see something dramatic in your newsfeed. Be skeptical. Seek out other news sources. Your blood pressure will thank you.