Keeping Up With the Twittersphere

Mary Hui, a reporter for Quartz and a FCC Clare Hollingworth Fellow, takes a look at how the media are using social media

The nature of Hong Kong’s ongoing protests — quickchanging, fast-flowing, widespread, decentralised, and spontaneous — makes it fiendishly difficult to keep track of all the latest developments. For journalists covering the movement, this has meant relying on three key tools for receiving and disseminating information: the encrypted messaging app Telegram; the local online forum LIHKG; and, of course, Twitter.

Of the three, Twitter is the most outward-facing platform and the most widely used among English-language journalists reporting on the protests. For a movement that is so intensely visual – think the human chains, the crowd parting like the Red Sea, the graphic videos of assaults, the colourful Post-it notes, the AirDrops of protest materials – Twitter is the perfect platform to present audiovisual material, alongside bitesized portions of context and analysis.

Unfortunately, it’s also ripe with misinformation and outright falsehoods. Twitter has so far shut down more than 5,200 accounts in China that were found to be attempting to sow discord and disinformation in Hong Kong.

Those accounts were part of a larger “spammy network” of some 200,000 China-based accounts. In an attempt to push back against the Chinese state narrative, and also to internationalise their publicity efforts, Hong Kong’s protesters have flocked to Twitter, as my colleague Isabella Steger has reported.

For journalists, being on Twitter means having to sift through mountains of questionable material. The onus is on them to do due diligence and ensure, to the best of their ability, that they do not contribute to the dissemination of inaccurate information.

Then there’s the harassment issue. Aside from targeting journalists with vile comments, some Twitter trolls have openly called for the doxxing of certain members of the press. Last month, there began to circulate a collage of Twitter profile images of mostly women journalists of Asian descent writing for English-language media, with calls to expose the reporters’ personal details.

I had the honour of making it onto the list, alongside illustrious company. The offending tweet (and perhaps also the account) appears to have since been taken down, but the battle against the trolls is neverending. For my part, I try to report any account that is clearly fake, or that is harassing myself or others.

As Twitter continues to feel like an extension of our journalist bodies, there emerges the question of whether or how to separate reportage and opinion. Elaine Yu, a former AFP correspondent covering Hong Kong and now a freelance journalist, sees value in understanding another reporter’s opinion. “I like, or don’t mind, opinion as long as it’s original and thoughtprovoking,” she said. “Knowing a journalist’s politics and subjectivity helps us understand their coverage better, too.”

I find myself in the same camp as author Antony Dapiran, who said: “I don’t think anyone in this post-postmodern age still genuinely believes in the sham of objectivity.” As both a journalist and a Hongkonger, I’m reminded of what Eliza Griswold, a visiting professor at Princeton with whom I took a journalism class (and who won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction this year), drilled into us: “Own your subjectivities.”

It’s something I keep in mind as I live and breathe protest Twitter.