Similarities with Newsgathering on Other Social Networks
While chat apps provide opportunities for reporters to cheaply and quickly source information during political unrest, there are other ways these apps open up challenges for reporters in the field. Similar to social networking and other online sources, these include: creating echo chambers, verification, curtailing government censorship and surveillance, and acquiring professional skills and experience.
Creating Echo Chambers
In addition to creating opportunities to engage audiences, chat apps allow journalists to target audiences and segment interests. Our case study showed that chat apps may initially appear to offer an alternative to the generally pro-government stories offered by news programs on television. But as journalists explored chat apps during political unrest, they found that a new and different set of echo chambers existed. Describing the Hong Kong protests of 2014, one digital journalist said, “I try to counter [echo chambers] by ‘liking’ [on Facebook] different pages, by including [pro-protest] pages, [pro-government] pages, and some more centrist websites or opinion sites.”59
Yet, some journalists were disillusioned by the ways that social media discourse became siloed and partisan. One reporter told us: “On the [pro-government] side they also have an extremely active social media presence. They do the same thing, mirroring what the [protest] side is doing with their own propaganda . . . I don’t see those things because my friends, by and large, do not share those things.”60 Some reporters found that chat apps gave journalists more access to media-savvy activists, but did little to enhance discourse with government figures. The result was a communicative space as polarized as other media. Indeed, not all sides in the debate used chat apps with equal enthusiasm or skill (i.e., the student group with the youngest supporters dominated this space).
Like other social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook,61,62 chat apps can create an illusion of a wider source network than journalists use in practice. On chat apps, journalists are less technologically reliant on a handful of legacy sources (e.g., state radio, dissidents with telephones, NGOs), but may choose to rely on a different but equally narrow set of sources, such as a small group of protest leaders. We found that some journalists saw chat apps not necessarily as an expansion of their social network, but instead as a way to keep in closer contact with people they already knew.
A related challenge of chat apps is particular platforms’ regional and national specificity. A digital reporter told us: “A really challenging thing about social media is that it’s so fragmented [across nations]. Likewise, everyone in the U.S. is on Snapchat, but people here are like, ‘What’s Snapchat?’” 63 This meant that journalists could make more effective use of existing sources for a particular region, but also that they might become more dependent on a regular set of sources. “On [chat apps] it’s more difficult to gather opinions across a broad range of people and fields of expertise,” said one reporter, adding: “It’s a lot more direct in that if I have somebody in my network already, it’s a lot easier to reach out to them to ask a question or arrange a phone call.”64 Thus, the regional popularity of chat apps can perpetuate the classic reportorial problem of overreliance on a few sources while providing the illusion of a wider source network.
Verification
Within the coverage of the political protests, whether it is in-person conversation, on social networking sites, or on chat apps, rumors present some of the most difficult challenges for journalists. During a fast-moving event, rumors develop quickly and frequently, and journalists must decide which to take seriously, what to investigate, and what to report to audiences. Procedures for verifying information vary from one news organization to another—and even within news organizations—depending on the nature of the story covered. Chat apps further complicate this picture, since they can provide a mix of information and user-generated content from people personally known to journalists (contacts in real life) and sources emerging from the swiftness and anonymity of more open social media platforms. Chat apps do, however, come with features (geolocation, image tagging) that can assist in verifying user-generated content.
Alternatively, chat apps spread rumors quickly due to the volume of communication they host and the multimedia nature of chat content, which can include images, videos, and text that is fabricated or provided out of context. Our interviews showed that many people use chat apps to communicate with preexisting social groups in real life, allowing one individual to quickly spread unverified or un-contextualized information to persons immediately known to him or her. With chat apps and well-connected protesters, a rumor can move across a protest site, to other protest sites in the same city, and to audiences around the world long before journalists are able to corroborate and weigh evidence.
For example, during the 2014 Hong Kong protests a widely circulated photo appeared to show an armored personnel carrier entering a major tunnel leading to Hong Kong Island. Had the photo been current, it would have suggested a major escalation of force involving the People’s Liberation Army. Journalists who covered this event told us they were asking questions like: Was this really a tunnel in Hong Kong? Was the photo current? Had the photo been altered in some way? The answer required local knowledge. Soon, local journalists and journalism students in Hong Kong determined that the photo was authentic, but dated to a military exercise from 2012. The chat apps’ group-chat function, and the ability to quickly share multimedia data along contact networks, assisted quicker contextualization and verification of this information. A wire journalist explained: “If the information is not verified, it’s not going to make it onto the wire. If it’s some sort of piece of color, like people are at the scene and sharing photographs of this and that, we take care to verify the dates of photos.”65
Confirming the origin of an image or clip that reaches a journalist through multiple re-sharings can be a difficult process. To determine the origins of user-generated content, journalists need to be active participants in chat app networks, not simply passive harvesters of the content. As a European digital journalist noted:
It’s hard to find the original uploader on WeChat. I think you really need to have somebody who’s entrenched in WeChat and uses it regularly. We run into a similar problem in Syria also, where a lot of photos and videos are shared via WhatsApp, and Israel, where WhatsApp is also quite big …I think the strategy for us is also to make relationships with people in these WhatsApp groups.66
When news breaks, and reporters in the field and newsroom are regularly sharing footage within groups, their verification work is made easier by physical or digital access to the point of content origin. Similarly, when reporters are part of preexisting groups or networks on chat apps, other users are more likely to trust the reporter and respond to requests for confirmations. During the Hong Kong protests, a reporter active on chat apps found that being a known participant was a critical part of verification:
Often we’ll get a message that says, “The police are coming to this place in fifteen minutes,” or “I heard that the police are going to shut down this section of Hong Kong,” or something. Word would just spread so fast. The quickest way [to verify this] would just be to go on the [protest movement message board] Facebook page and check: Do they have anyone on the ground in these places? Do they have pictures to verify that rumor? 67
Even small online communities of dedicated witnesses and fact-checkers can make a critical difference in verifying rumors.
Although in the case we studied news organizations and individual reporters used chat apps in a method similar to how social networking sites and user-generated content have been used since their beginnings,68 one of the more interesting findings of this report was how and why news organizations used chat apps to organize themselves.